Zifan Xu

LARG | UTCS | Texas Robotic | zfxu [at] utexas.edu

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I am a Ph.D. student of Computer Science at University of Texas at Austin. I am very honored to be advised by Prof. Peter Stone. I have general interests in reinforcement learning, meta learning, curriculum learning, and their applicaitons in robotics. My primiary focus is to apply deep reinforcement learning for mobile robot autonomous navigation.

Before I started the CS program, I recieved master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Physics, but was lucky to find my passion in artificial intellegence. Feel free to reach out to me if you are curious about my research!

Contact: Email / Github / Google Scholar / Twitter

News

Oct 15, 2024 Our paper LaRS is accepted as a finding at EMNLP 2024!
May 11, 2024 We presented one paper on legged locomotion in confined 3D space at ICRA 2024.
May 04, 2024 We presented one paper on multitask RL at ICLR 2024.

Selected Publications

🤖 RL for Robotics

  1. Dexterous Legged Locomotion in Confined 3D Spaces with Reinforcement Learning
    Zifan Xu, Amir Hossain Raj , Xuesu Xiao , and Peter Stone
    In Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) , May 2024
  2. Benchmarking Reinforcement Learning Techniques for Autonomous Navigation
    Zifan Xu, Bo Liu , Anirudh Nair , Xuesu Xiao , and Peter Stone
    Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2023
  3. APPLR: Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Reinforcement
    Zifan Xu, Gauraang Dhamankar , Anirudh Nair , Xuesu Xiao , Garrett Warnell , and 3 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) , Jun 2021

📘 Curriculum Learning for RL

  1. Ziping Xu , Zifan Xu, Runxuan Jiang , Peter Stone , and Ambuj Tewari
    In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) , May 2024
  2. Model-Based Meta Automatic Curriculum Learning
    Zifan Xu, Yulin Zhang , Shahaf S. Shperberg , Reuth Mirsky , Yuqian Jiang , and 2 more authors
    In The Second Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (CoLLAs) , Aug 2023
  3. Task Factorization in Curriculum Learning
    Reuth Mirsky , Shahaf S. Shperberg , Yulin Zhang , Zifan Xu, Yuqian Jiang , and 2 more authors
    In Decision Awareness in Reinforcement Learning (DARL) workshop at the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , Jul 2022

💭 LLMs Reasoning

  1. LaRS: Latent Reasoning Skills for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
    Zifan Xu, Haozhu Wang , Dmitriy Bespalov , Xian Wu , Peter Stone , and 1 more author
    In Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing , Nov 2024