Xintao Yan   严鑫涛
I am a Postdoctoral research fellow advised by Prof. Henry Liu
(Michigan Traffic Lab) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
I completed my Ph.D. in 2023 from the same lab.
I received my Bachelor's degree from the School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University in 2018.
My research interests revolve around the intersection of automotive engineering,
transportation engineering, and artificial intelligence, with a primary emphasis
on Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) and infrastructure.
Specifically, I aim to enhance the safety performance of CAVs through
innovative training and testing methods while understanding their impact
on human travel behavior when deployed at scale.
Email  / 
Google Scholar  / 
Github
|
|
News
2023/10 - I successfully defended my dissertation titled: Simulating Naturalistic Driving Environment for Autonomous Vehicles.
|
2023/10 - I will present our work titled "Learning naturalistic driving environment with statistical realism"
on IROS 2023 and
INFORMS 2023 Annual Meeting.
|
2023/09 - The code for our
NeuralNDE
and D2RL papers have been released.
|
2023/06 - Our paper on driving environment simulation has been highlighted
and chosen as the front page of the Nature Communications website!
|
2023/04 - Our paper on driving environment simulation was published in
Nature Communications and featured in
Editor's Highlights!
|
2023/03 - Our paper on autonomous vehicle testing was published in
Nature and was selected
as the cover of March 23, 2023 Issue!
|
Selected Publications
|
Learning Naturalistic Driving Environment with Statistical Realism
Xintao Yan+,
Zhengxia Zou+,
Shuo Feng,
Haojie Zhu,
Haowei Sun,
Henry X. Liu
Nature Communications, 2023.
+ indicates equal contribution
[PDF]
[Github]
The high-fidelity simulator is an effective tool for training and testing of
autonomous vehicles. However, due to the high
dimensionality of real-world driving environments and the rarity of long-tail
safety-critical events, how to achieve statistical realism in simulation is a longstanding
problem. To address this, we develop NeuralNDE, a deep learning-based framework that
can reproduce the naturalistic driving environment with statistical realism,
particularly for safety-critical situations.
This study has been featured on the journal front page.
This study has also been selected as a featured article in
Editors' Highlights on "Applied physics and mathematics".
The aim of the Editors' Highlights page
is to showcase the 50 best papers recently published in an area.
- Media coverage:
Ann Arbor Observer
|
University of Michigan
|
Science Daily
|
TechXplore
|
MIT Technology Review China
|
量子位
|
|
Dense Reinforcement Learning for Safety Validation of Autonomous Vehicles
Shuo Feng,
Haowei Sun,
Xintao Yan,
Haojie Zhu,
Zhengxia Zou,
Shengyin Shen,
Henry X. Liu
Nature, 2023.
[PDF]
[Nature Cover]
[Github]
One critical bottleneck that impedes the development and deployment of autonomous
vehicles is the prohibitively high economic and time costs required to validate their
safety in a naturalistic driving environment, owing to the rarity of safety-critical
events. Here we report the development of an intelligent testing environment, where
artificial-intelligence-based background agents are trained to validate the safety
performances of autonomous vehicles in an accelerated mode, without loss of
unbiasedness.
This study has been selected as the Nature journal
cover of the March 23, 2023 Issue.
- Media coverage:
Wall Street Journal
|
Nature News & Views
|
Nature Podcast
|
Nature Video
|
NSF
|
CCAT
|
University of Michigan News
|
Michigan Engineering
|
|
Intelligent Driving Intelligence Test for Autonomous Vehicles with Naturalistic and Adversarial Environment
Shuo Feng,
Xintao Yan,
Haowei Sun,
Yiheng Feng,
Henry X. Liu
Nature Communications, 2021.
[PDF]
[Editors' Highlights]
[Github]
Tests for autonomous vehicles are usually made in the naturalistic driving
environment where safety-critical scenarios are rare. We propose a
testing approach combining naturalistic and adversarial environment which
allows to accelerate testing process and detect dangerous driving events.
This study has been selected as a featured article in
Editors' Highlights on "AI and machine learning".
- Award:
(SIG) Outstanding Paper in Intelligent Transportation Systems
- Media coverage:
CCAT
|
University of Michigan
|
TechXplore
|
Sohu
|
Teaching
Co-instructor of CEE 551: Traffic Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Fall 2023
|
Co-instructor of CEE 551: Traffic Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Fall 2022
|
Graduate Student Instructor of CEE 450: Introduction to Transportation Engineering,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Winter 2021
|
Academic Service
Professional Organization:
Member of the
SAE On-Road Automated Driving (ORAD) Verification and Validation Task Force
|
Misc
I was the captain of the men's basketball team of Tsinghua University (清华男篮校二队).
I won the Tsinghua University basketball championship twice (2016, 2017) during my time at the
Department of Automotive Engineering (now the School of Vehicle and Mobility).
|