I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Virginia, where I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Yen-Ling Kuo and a recipient of the Provost Fellowship.
I received my M.S.E in Robotics from Johns Hopkins University (2023-2025), where I conducted research in SCAI under the supervision of Professor Tianmin Shu. I received my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Cincinnati (2018-2023) and B.E in Mechanical Engineering from Chongqing University (2018-2023).
My research interest lies in developing AI systems with advanced social reasoning abilities. Fundamentally, this involves equipping AI with the capacity to infer and reason about the mental states of others, such as their intentions, beliefs, and goals, akin to Theory of Mind.
News
- [Feb, 2026] Get accepted to the Brains, Minds, and Machines Summer Course at MIT, see you there!
- [Feb, 2026] Co-organizing CVPR 2026 Workshop on "ReLearn: Rediscovering Intelligence: Can AI Still Learn from Humans?".
- [Sep, 2025] Two papers get accpeted by NeurIPS 2025.
Publication
SimWorld: An Open-ended Simulator for Agents in Physical and Social Worlds
Author: Xiaokang Ye*, Jiawei Ren*, Yan Zhuang, Xuhong He, Yiming Liang, Yiqing Yang, Xianrui Zhong, Mrinaal Dogra, Eric Liu, Kevin Benavente, Rajiv Mandya Nagaraju, Dhruv Vivek Sharma, Ziqiao Ma, Tianmin Shu†, Zhiting Hu†, Lianhui Qin†
Conference: NeurIPS 2025 (Spotlight)
SimWorld-Robotics: Synthesizing Photorealistic and Dynamic Urban Environments for Multimodal Robot Navigation and Collaboration
Author: Yan Zhuang, Jiawei Ren*, Xiaokang Ye*, Jianzhi Shen, Ruixuan Zhang, Tianai Yue, Muhammad Faayez, Xuhong He, Ziqiao Ma, Lianhui Qin†, Zhiting Hu†, Tianmin Shu†
Conference: NeurIPS 2025 (main track)
Towards High-Quality CGRA Mapping with Graph Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning
Author: Yan Zhuang, Zhihao Zhang, Dajiang Liu
Conference: ICCAD 2022