TAMS Lab Logo
TAMS Lab launches at UCLA, November 2025
TAMS Lab launches at UCLA, November 2025

The Trustworthy Autonomous Mobility System (TAMS) Lab at UCLA develops embodied AI agents that can safely and reliably operate in human-centered environments. Our research lies at the intersection of control, robotics, and learning. We are dedicated to exploring principled approaches that integrate data-driven methods (deep learning, generative models, reinforcement learning, imitation learning) with control theory, explainable AI, and causality. Our work focuses on applications in autonomous driving and robot navigation. Our long-term vision is to facilitate trustworthy and human-centered autonomy, aiming to expedite the integration of autonomous systems into everyday life to yield substantial societal benefits.

news

Jun 01, 2026 The paper “Simple Recipe Works” received the Best Paper Award at the ICRA 2026 Workshop on Reinforcement Learning in the Era of Imitation Learning (RL4IL)! Checkout the paper and code.
May 18, 2026 Dr. Tang gave an invited talk at the ECE Seminar Series, University of California Riverside!
May 05, 2026 The paper “Simple Recipe Works: Vision-Language-Action Models are Natural Continual Learners with Reinforcement Learning” is accepted for RLC 2026! Checkout the paper and code.
Apr 30, 2026 The paper “TIC-VLA: A Think-in-Control Vision-Language-Action Model for Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments” is accepted for ICML 2026! Checkout the paper, code, and website.
Mar 25, 2026 Dr. Tang received a Tier-2 Sandbox Grant (Educational Innovation Grants Program) from the UCLA Teaching and Learning Center to support the new graduate course CEE 298: Human-Centered Autonomy for Mobility Systems!
Dec 19, 2025 The paper “CoopReflect: Towards Natural Language Communication for Cooperative Autonomous Driving via Multi-Agent Learning” is accepted for AAMAS 2026! Checkout the paper, code, and website.
Nov 01, 2025 Dr. Tang joins UCLA CEE as Assistant Professor.
Oct 05, 2025 Dr. Tang gave an invited talk at the Foundation Models for Control (FM4Control): Bridging Language, Vision, and Control workshop at the 5th Modeling, Estimation and Control Conference (MECC 2025)!
Aug 17, 2025 Dr. Tang gave an invited talk at the Workshop on The Future of Work in the Age of Robotics and AI at the IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE 2025)!
Aug 06, 2025 Dr. Tang is serving as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV), 2025–2026!
Aug 01, 2025 Three papers on social robot navigation (SocialNav-SUB and ComposableNav) and learning from human intervention (MEReQ) are accepted for CoRL 2025!
May 01, 2025 The paper “WOMD-Reasoning: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Interaction and Intention Reasoning in Driving” is accepted for ICML 2025! You can download the WOMD-Reasoning dataset from Waymo’s official site. Checkout the paper and code for more details.
Jan 22, 2025 The paper “Residual-MPPI: Online Policy Customization for Continuous Control” is accepted for ICLR 2025! Checkout the paper, code, and website.
Aug 07, 2024 Checkout the survey paper “Deep reinforcement learning for Robotics: A Survey of Real-World Successes”! It will appear on Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems 2025.
Jul 03, 2024 The paper “Optimizing diffusion models for joint trajectory prediction and controllable generation” is accepted for ECCV 2024! Check out the website and code!
Jun 30, 2024 The paper “Pre-training on synthetic driving data for trajectory prediction” is accepted for IROS 2024! And the RA-L paper “Skill-Critic: Refining learned skills for hierarchical reinforcement learning” is accepted for oral presentation at IROS 2024 (check out the website and code)!
Jun 27, 2024 The paper “Active exploration in iterative gaussian process regression for uncertainty modeling in autonomous racing” is accepted for IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology (T-CST)!
Jun 10, 2024 The paper “Learning online belief prediction for efficient POMDP planning in autonomous driving” is accepted for RA-L!
Jun 06, 2024 The paper “Grounded relational inference: Domain knowledge-driven explainable autonomous driving” is accepted for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS)!
Jun 02, 2024 The paper “BeTAIL: Behavior transformer adversarial imitation learning from human racing gameplay” is accepted for RA-L. Check out the website and code!
May 14, 2024 The paper “Quantifying interaction level between agents helps cost-efficient generalization in multi-agent reinforcement learning” is accepted for RLC 2024! Checkout the code and paper!
Jan 29, 2024 The paper “Guided Online Distillation: Promoting Safe Reinforcement Learning by Offline Demonstration” is accepted for ICRA 2024, and the RA-L paper “Editing Driver Character: Socially-Controllable Behavior Generation for Interactive Traffic Simulation” will also be presented at ICRA 2024!
Oct 16, 2023 We organized the Workshop on Scenario and Behavior Diversity in Simulation for Autonomous Vehicle Validation at IEEE IAVVC 2023!
Sep 21, 2023 The paper “Residual Q-learning: Offline and online policy customization without value” is accepted for NeurIPS 2023! Checkout the paper, code, and website.
Aug 01, 2023 Dr. Tang started as a Postdoctoral Fellow in LARG at UT Austin!
Jun 08, 2023 The paper “Editing driver character: socially-controllable behavior generation for interactive traffic simulation” is accepted for RA-L!
Jun 04, 2023 Dr. Tang gave an invited talk at the Workshop on Social, Interactive and Safe Behaviors for AVs: Benchmarks, Models, and Applications at IEEE IV 2023!
Jun 04, 2023 We organized the Workshop on the Development of Socially-compliant Driving Behaviour for Automated Vehicles at IEEE IV 2023!
Apr 28, 2023 Dr. Tang is selected as one of the 30 Robotics Pioneers for 2023!