Autonomous systems must operate safely in complex human environments, but real-world testing is limited and risky. We develop scalable evaluation methods — including generative simulation for interactive environments, diffusion models for trajectory prediction and scenario generation, and off-policy evaluation techniques — to rigorously assess autonomous system performance before deployment. We also build benchmarks and datasets for driving reasoning to enable standardized evaluation across the community.
@article{zhu2026scape,title={{SCAPE}: Scenario-Conditioned Simulation-Augmented Policy Evaluation},author={Zhu, Dijie and Oh, Seunghun and Huang, Ruopeng and Huang, Zhiyu and Ma, Jiaqi and Tang, Chen},journal={arXiv preprint (coming soon)},year={2026}}
2025
ICML 2025
WOMD-Reasoning: A Large-Scale Language Dataset for Interactions and Driving Intentions Reasoning
Yiheng Li, Cunxin Fan, Chongjian Ge, and 9 more authors
Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
@article{li2024womd,title={{WOMD-Reasoning}: A Large-Scale Language Dataset for Interactions and Driving Intentions Reasoning},author={Li, Yiheng and Fan, Cunxin and Ge, Chongjian and Zhao, Seth Z. and Li, Chenran and Xu, Chenfeng and Yao, Huaxiu and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Zhou, Bolei and Tang, Chen and Ding, Mingyu and Zhan, Wei},journal={Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},year={2025},}
CoRL 2025
SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigation
Michael J. Munje, Chen Tang, Shuijing Liu, and 6 more authors
@article{munje2025socialnavsub,title={SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigation},author={Munje, Michael J. and Tang, Chen and Liu, Shuijing and Hu, Zichao and Zhu, Yifeng and Cui, Jiaxun and Warnell, Garrett and Biswas, Joydeep and Stone, Peter},journal={Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)},year={2025},}
2024
ECCV 2024
Optimizing Diffusion Models for Joint Trajectory Prediction and Controllable Generation
Yixiao Wang, Chen Tang, Lingfeng Sun, and 8 more authors
In European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
@inproceedings{wang2024OGD,title={Optimizing Diffusion Models for Joint Trajectory Prediction and Controllable Generation},author={Wang, Yixiao and Tang, Chen and Sun, Lingfeng and Rossi, Simone and Xie, Yichen and Peng, Chensheng and Hannagan, Thomas and Sabatini, Stefano and Poerio, Nicola and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Zhan, Wei},booktitle={European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},year={2024},}
2023
RA-L 2023
Editing Driver Character: Socially-Controllable Behavior Generation for Interactive Traffic Simulation
Wei-Jer Chang*, Chen Tang*, Chenran Li, and 3 more authors
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023
presented at 2023 CVPR Workshop on Multi-Agent Behavior: Properties, Computation, and Emergence (MABe) and 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
@article{chang2023scbg,author={Chang, Wei-Jer and Tang, Chen and Li, Chenran and Hu, Yeping and Tomizuka, Masayoshi and Zhan, Wei},journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)},title={Editing Driver Character: Socially-Controllable Behavior Generation for Interactive Traffic Simulation},year={2023},volume={},number={},pages={1-8},doi={10.1109/LRA.2023.3291897},note={presented at 2023 CVPR Workshop on Multi-Agent Behavior: Properties, Computation, and Emergence (MABe) and 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)}}
2021
NeurIPS 2021
Exploring Social Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoder for Interaction Modeling
Chen Tang, Wei Zhan, and Masayoshi Tomizuka
In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021
@inproceedings{tang2021social,author={Tang, Chen and Zhan, Wei and Tomizuka, Masayoshi},booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},pages={8481--8494},title={Exploring Social Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoder for Interaction Modeling},volume={34},year={2021},}
SCAPE: Scenario-Conditioned Simulation-Augmented Policy EvaluationarXiv preprint (coming soon), 2026
Editing Driver Character: Socially-Controllable Behavior Generation for Interactive Traffic SimulationIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2023presented at 2023 CVPR Workshop on Multi-Agent Behavior: Properties, Computation, and Emergence (MABe) and 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)