Zilin Huang

Ph.D. Student
Research Assistant
​Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Office: Engineering Centers Building 1066
Email: zilin.huang@wisc.edu

Hey, thanks for stopping by! :wave:

I am currently a third-year Ph.D. student in Transportation Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, working under the guidance of Prof. Sikai (Sky) Chen. I’m also the Co-Founder of Sky-Lab. Before joining UW-Madison, I worked with Prof. Samuel Labi at the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT), Purdue University.

I envision that future transportation systems will be composed of diverse intelligent agents, such as autonomous vehicles, delivery robots, and flying vehicles. These agents must not only operate safely, but also understand human behaviors, preferences, and social norms, and collaborate effectively with road users.Building on this vision, my research aims to develop human-centered, trustworthy, and interactive autonomous systems that enable agents to not only perceive and reason about complex and dynamic traffic environments, but more importantly, to interact naturally with humans and make safe, socially aligned, and context-aware decisions. By implementing these capabilities, we can achieve better societal goals, such as enhanced safety, mobility, efficiency, and sustainability, as well as improved user trust and satisfaction, ultimately building a future where humans and intelligent agents coexist harmoniously.

Methodologically, I am interested in the following areas:

  • Autonomous Vehicles
  • Human-AI Collaboration
  • Large Language Models
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Digital Twin
  • Traffic Flow Theory

🔔 I will be graduating in December 2025 and will be on the academic job market. I welcome any inquiries about potential opportunities.

Recent News View All

Mar 20, 2025 News thumbnail 🎉 Received Two NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Awards ($43,800 USD).
We received two NVIDIA grants for AI research in transportation - 20,000 A100 GPU hours for SafetyGPT and two RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs for EdgeTwin Project. Read more →
Mar 14, 2025 News thumbnail 🎉 We delivered a presentation to Li Auto AD team on our latest work VLM-RL. The presentation attracted over 330+ engineers to attend.
Jan 12, 2025 News thumbnail 👏 I attended the TRB 2025 Annual Meeting.
I participated in the Transportation Research Board (TRB) 104th Annual Meeting (January 7-11) at the Washington, D.C. Convention Center. We presented our work in multiple poster and lectern sessions, engaging... Read more →
Jan 10, 2025 News thumbnail 👏 I was invited to visit Google
I was invited to visit Google’s office in Washington DC on January 10, 2025. During the visit, I had the opportunity to meet with Google’s research team and discuss potential... Read more →
Oct 18, 2024 News thumbnail 🎉 Paper Traffic expertise meets residual RL: Knowledge-informed model-based residual reinforcement learning for CAV trajectory control is published on Communications in Transportation Research.

Selected Publications citations 404
View All

  1. Preprint
    CurricuVLM: Towards Safe Autonomous Driving via Personalized Safety-Critical Curriculum Learning with Vision-Language Models 🔥🔥🔥
    Zihao Sheng+, Zilin Huang+, Yansong Qu, Yue Leng, Sruthi Bhavanam, and Sikai Chen*
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.15119 (Preprint) , 2025
    PDF Website Code
  2. Preprint
    VLM-RL: A Unified Vision Language Models and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Safe Autonomous Driving 🔥🔥🔥
    Zilin Huang+, Zihao Sheng+, Yansong Qu+, Junwei You, and Sikai Chen*
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.15544 (Preprint) , 2024
    PDF Website Code
  3. Preprint
    Trustworthy Human-AI Collaboration: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback and Physics Knowledge for Safe Autonomous Driving 🔥🔥🔥
    Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, and Sikai Chen*
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.00858 (Preprint) , 2024
    PDF Website Code
  4. COMMTR
    Human as AI mentor: Enhanced human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning for safe and efficient autonomous driving 🔥🔥🔥
    Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, Chengyuan Ma, and Sikai Chen*
    Communications in Transportation Research (COMMTR) , 2024
    PDF Website Code
  5. IEEE-TITS
    Toward C-V2X Enabled Connected Transportation System: RSU-Based Cooperative Localization Framework for Autonomous Vehicles 🔥🔥🔥
    Zilin Huang, Sikai Chen*, Yuzhuang Pian, Zihao Sheng, Soyoung Ahn, and David A Noyce
    IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (IEEE-TITS) , 2024
    PDF Code

Sponsors

We are thankful for the generous funding award and gift from the following sponsors:

Global Visitor Statistics