Haicheng Liao (廖海成)

Short Bio

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Macau (UM), supervised by Prof. Zhenning Li and Prof. Chengzhong Xu (IEEE Fellow, recipient of the Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Prize). I am affiliated with the State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (SKL-IOTSC). I earned my B.E. from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in 2022.

Passionate about Intelligent Transportation Systems, I bring AI&ML techniques to Human-Like Autonomous Driving, broadly including four key research themes: (1) Trajectory Prediction & Planning, (2) Multimodal Grounding, (3) Accident Anticipation, (4) End-to-end Autonomous Driving.

I have published 30+ papers as the first/co-first author in prestigious journals such as Engineering, Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), Transportation Science, IEEE (T-PAMI, T-RO, T-ITS, T-AI, T-IV), COMMTR, Information Fusion, TR-Part C, and AAP, and at leading AI conferences like CVPR, ICCV, AAAI (Oral), ACM MM (Oral), ECCV, IJCAI, ECAI, and ICRA.

Over the years, we've mentored 10+ outstanding students, many of whom have advanced to top-tier institutions like Tsinghua University (THU), Peking University (PKU), Purdue University (PU), Zhejiang University (ZJU), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), and Tongji University (TJU).

I am actively seeking research collaborations and welcome ideas for joint projects. If you are interested in collaborating or sharing thoughts, please feel free to reach out via Email.

News

All publications →

2026/10
Our paper Adaptive LLM reasoning for AD has been accepted by Artificial Intelligence (AIJ).
2026/09
Our paper End-to-End Accident Anticipation has been accepted by Engineering (CAE Flag Journal).
2026/07
Our paper SWIFT has been accepted by IEEE TPAMI.
2026/06
Our paper SFM has been accepted by ECCV 2026.
2026/03
Our paper Addressing Corner Cases has been published in Transportation Research Part C (TR-C).
2026/02
Two papers have been accepted by CVPR 2026: Think Before You Drive and E3AD.
2026/02
Our paper ROAR has been published in Accident Analysis & Prevention.
2025/11
Two papers have been accepted by AAAI 2026: Differentiable Semantic Meta-Learning and Predict and Resist.
2025/08
Our paper SafeCast has been accepted by AI Open.
2025/07
Our paper SA-TP² has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO).
2025/07
Our paper World Model-Based Scene Generation has been accepted by Communications Engineering.
2025/07
Our paper Eyes on the Road, Mind Beyond Vision has been accepted by ACM MM 2025.
2025/06
Our paper AMD has been accepted by ICCV 2025.
2025/05
Our paper Beyond Patterns has been accepted by IJCAI 2025.
2025/04
Our paper Domain-Enhanced Dual-Branch Model has been accepted by Communications in Transportation Research.
2025/04
Our paper CoT-Drive has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI).
2025/03
Our paper Human-like trajectory prediction has been accepted by Transportation Science.
2025/01
Our paper WAKE has been accepted by IEEE TPAMI.
2025
Our paper DRIVE appeared at ICRA 2025.
2025
Our paper Learning New Concepts, Remembering the Old appeared at ACM MM 2025.
2025
Two papers have been published in IEEE TITS: Chain-of-Thought Guided Accident Anticipation and Minds on the Move.
2025
Our paper Improving Visual Grounding received a Best Paper Award at CICTP 2025.
2025
Our paper NEST appeared at AAAI 2025 as an Oral Presentation.
2025
Two papers have been published in Information Fusion: DEMO and LATTE.

Selected Publications

(*): I am the co-first author; (†): Corresponding author (See [Google Scholar] for full publications.)

Engineering 2026 End-to-End Traffic Accident Anticipation and Localization for Autonomous Driving — paper figure

End-to-End Traffic Accident Anticipation and Localization for Autonomous Driving

Haicheng Liao, Chengyue Wang, Bin Rao, Jiaxun Zhang, Haoyu Sun, Zhenning Li†, Chengzhong Xu, Hai Yang, Keqiang Li†

Engineering, 2026 [CAE Flag Journal]

TS 2025

Towards Human-Like Trajectory Prediction: A Behavior-Centric Approach

Haicheng Liao, Zhenning Li†, Keqiang Li, Chengzhong Xu

Transportation Science (TS), 2025 [Most Prestigious Journal in Transportation]

TRO 2025

SA‑TP²: A Safety-Aware Trajectory Prediction and Planning Model for Autonomous Driving

Haicheng Liao, Zhenning Li†, Kaiqun Zhu, Keqiang Li, Chengzhong Xu

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (IEEE TRO), 2025

CVPR 2026

Think Before You Drive: World Model-Inspired Multimodal Grounding for Autonomous Vehicles

Haicheng Liao, Huanming Shen, Bonan Wang, Yongkang Li, Yihong Tang, Chengyue Wang, Dingyi Zhuang, Kehua Chen, Hai Yang, Chengzhong Xu†, Zhenning Li†

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026

AIJ 2026

Adaptive Large Language Model Reasoning for Autonomous Driving Decision-Making

Haicheng Liao, Chengyue Wang, Hanlin Kong, Zhenning Li†, Zhengbing He, Zhiyong Cui, Guohui Zhang, Chengzhong Xu†

Artificial Intelligence (AIJ), 2026

TR-C 2025

Addressing Corner Cases in Autonomous Driving: A World Model-based Approach with Mixture of Experts and LLMs

Haicheng Liao, Bonan Wang, Junxian Yang, Chengyue Wang, Zhengbin He, Guohui Zhang, Chengzhong Xu, Zhenning Li†

Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies (TR-C), 2025

TPAMI 2025

WAKE: Towards Robust and Physically Feasible Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Vehicles with WAvelet and KinEmatics Synergy

Chengyue Wang*, Haicheng Liao*, Zhenning Li†, Chengzhong Xu

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2025

[TRC'30] "Towards Human-like Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving: A Cognitive-inspired Lightweight Model."
- The 30th Anniversary of Transportation Research Part C (TRC-30) (Transportation Conf., Oral Presentation)
- Haicheng Liao, Yongkang Li, Yanchen Guan, Zhenning Li, Chengyue Wang, Zilin Bian, Ziyuan Pu, Jia Hu, Zhiyong Cui
[CICTP'23] "An Efficient Bayesian Robit Model for Traffic Safety Modeling."
- COTA (Chinese Overseas Transportation Association) International Conference of Transportation Professionals (Transportation Conf.)
- Haicheng Liao, Huanming Shen, Bonan Wang, Chengyue Wang, Bin Rao, Hao Yu, Chengzhong Xu, Zhenning Li
- [Paper]
[CICTP'25] "Improving Visual Grounding for Autonomous Driving with Large Language Models."
- COTA (Chinese Overseas Transportation Association) International Conference of Transportation Professionals (Transportation Conf., Best Paper Award)
- Haicheng Liao, Huanming Shen, Bonan Wang, Chengyue Wang, Bin Rao, Hao Yu, Chengzhong Xu, Zhenning Li
- [Paper]
[TRB'24] "Achieving Human-Like Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Vehicles: A Behavior-Aware Approach."
- The 103th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting (Top Transportation Conf., Oral Presentation, AR: 174/4385 ≈ 3.6%)
- Haicheng Liao, Hanlin Kong, Huanming Shen, Zhenning Li, Ruru Tang, Ziyuan Pu, Shengbo Li, Chengzhong Xu
- [Paper]
[TRB'24] "Lightweight Human Observation-inspired Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving."
- The 103th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting (Top Transportation Conf.)
- Yongkang Li*, Haicheng Liao*, Shangqian Liu, Zhenning Li, Wenyu Li, Kai Zhang, Shengbo Li, Chengzhong Xu
[AAP'24] "Efficient and robust estimation of single-vehicle crash severity: A mixed logit model with heterogeneity in means and variances."
- Accident Analysis & Prevention (Transportation Journal)
- Zhenning Li, Chengyue Wan, Haicheng Liao, Guofa Li, Chengzhong Xu
- [Paper]
[Chain'24] "Steering the Future: Redefining Intelligent Transportation Systems with Foundation Models."
- Chain (Transportation Journal)
- Zhenning Li, Zhiyong Cui, Haicheng Liao, John Ash, Guohui Zhang, Chengzhong Xu, Yinhai Wang
- [Paper]
[ICRA'25] "DRIVE: Dependable Robust Interpretable Visionary Ensemble Framework in Autonomous Driving."
- The 28th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Robotics Conf.)
- Songning Lai, Tianlang Xue, Hongru Xiao, Lijie Hu, Jiemin Wu, Ninghui Feng, Runwei Guan, Haicheng Liao, Zhenning Li, Yutao Yue
- [Paper]
[MM'25] "Eyes on the Road, Mind Beyond Vision: Context-Aware Multi-modal Enhanced Risk Anticipation."
- The 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (AI Conf.)
- Jiaxun Zhang, Haicheng Liao, Yumu Xie, Chengyue Wang, Yanchen Guan, Bin Rao, Zhenning Li
- [Paper]
[MM'25] "Learning New Concepts, Remembering the Old: Continual Learning for Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Models."
- The 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (AI Conf.)
- Songning Lai, Mingqian Liao, Zhangyi Hu, Jiayu Yang, Wenshuo Chen, Hongru Xiao, Jianheng Tang, Haicheng Liao, Yutao Yue
- [Paper]

Haicheng Liao (廖海成)

Short Bio

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