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
Google Scholar        

Hey, thanks for stopping by! :wave:

I am currently a third-year Ph.D. student in Transportation Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 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.

My research interest lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, Human-computer Interactions, Traffic Flow Theory, Control Theory, Cognitive Sciences, and their applications to intelligent autonomous systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, drones, cyber-physical systems). And, I have a strong passion for bridging the gap between technical findings and their practical implementation. Before embarking on my Ph.D. journey, I established two technology companies in China. :grin:

More specifically, I am currently interested in these challenges:

  • Human-in-the-loop AI
  • Autonomous Vehicles
  • Human-AI Collaboration
  • Vision/Large Language Models
  • Emobodied AI
The ultimate goal of my research is to develop Human-centered, Trustworthy, Interactive, and Social Awareness autonomous embodied agents that can perceive, understand, and reason about complex transportation environments; safely interact and collaborate with road users; and efficiently coordinate with other intelligent agents so that they can benefit society in daily life by enhancing travel Safety, Mobility, Efficiency, and Sustainability.

Recent News

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.
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.
Sep 1, 2024 News thumbnail 📢 We currently released one paper: Trustworthy Human-AI Collaboration: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback and Physics Knowledge for Safe Autonomous Driving.
Jun 13, 2024 News thumbnail 🎉 Paper Toward C-V2X Enabled Connected Transportation System: RSU-Based Cooperative Localization Framework for Autonomous Vehicles is published on IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.

Please check this webpage for more news about me.

Selected Publications

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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

Please check this webpage for more publications.

Sponsors

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

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