← Search

Thomas Tian

11 accepted papers

2026

Counterfactual VLA: Self-Reflective Vision-Language-Action Model with Adaptive Reasoning

CVPR 2026

Recent reasoning-augmented Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have improved the interpretability of end-to-end autonomous driving by generating intermediate reasoning traces. Yet these models primarily describe what they perceive and intend to do, rarely questioning whether their planned actions ar

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reimagination with Test-Time Observation Interventions: Distractor-Robust World Model Predictions for Visual Model Predictive Control

ICRA 2026poster

World models enable robots to “imagine” future observations given current observations and planned actions, and have been increasingly adopted as generalized dynamics models to facilitate robot learning. Despite their promise, these models remain brittle when encountering novel visual distractors su…

2025

Direct Post-Training Preference Alignment for Multi-Agent Motion Generation Model Using Implicit Feedback from Pre-training Demonstrations

ICLR 2025spotlight

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized motion generation models in embodied applications such as autonomous driving and robotic manipulation. While LLM-type auto-regressive motion generation models benefit from training scalability, there remains a discrepancy betwee…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

From Foresight to Forethought: VLM-In-the-Loop Policy Steering via Latent Alignment

RSS 2025poster

While generative robot policies have demonstrated significant potential in learning complex, multimodal behaviors from demonstrations, they still exhibit diverse failures at deployment-time. Policy steering offers an elegant solution to reducing the chance of failure by using an external verifier to…

Cited by 1PDFScholar
2025

MEReQ: Max-Ent Residual-Q Inverse RL for Sample-Efficient Alignment from Intervention

CoRL 2025poster

Aligning robot behavior with human preferences is crucial for deploying embodied AI agents in human-centered environments. A promising solution is interactive imitation learning from human intervention, where a human expert observes the policy's execution and provides interventions as feedback. Howe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Human-oriented Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

RSS 2024poster

Humans inherently possess generalizable visual representations that empower them to efficiently explore and interact with the environments in manipulation tasks. We advocate that such a representation automatically arises from simultaneously learning about multiple simple perceptual skills that are…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2024

Not All Errors Are Made Equal: A Regret Metric for Detecting System-level Trajectory Prediction Failures

CoRL 2024poster

Robot decision-making increasingly relies on data-driven human prediction models when operating around people. While these models are known to mispredict in out-of-distribution interactions, only a subset of prediction errors impact downstream robot performance. We propose characterizing such ``sy…

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2024

Sparse Diffusion Policy: A Sparse, Reusable, and Flexible Policy for Robot Learning

CoRL 2024poster

The increasing complexity of tasks in robotics demands efficient strategies for multitask and continual learning. Traditional models typically rely on a universal policy for all tasks, facing challenges such as high computational costs and catastrophic forgetting when learning new tasks. To address…

Cited by 17SourceScholar
2024

Tokenize the World into Object-level Knowledge to Address Long-tail Events in Autonomous Driving

CoRL 2024poster

The autonomous driving industry is increasingly adopting end-to-end learning from sensory inputs to minimize human biases in system design. Traditional end-to-end driving models, however, suffer from long-tail events due to rare or unseen inputs within their training distributions. To address this,…

Cited by 13SourceScholar
2024

What Matters to You? Towards Visual Representation Alignment for Robot Learning

ICLR 2024poster

When operating in service of people, robots need to optimize rewards aligned with end-user preferences. Since robots will rely on raw perceptual inputs, their rewards will inevitably use visual representations. Recently there has been excitement in using representations from pre-trained visual model…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar