Yansong Qu

Transportation Lab

Delon and Elizabeth Hampton Hall of Civil Engineering

West Lafayette, IN 47907

Hi there! Welcome to my personal website! 👋

I am currently a first-year Ph.D. student in Civil Engineering (Transportation) at Purdue University - West Lafayette, advised by Prof. Samuel Labi at the Center for Connected and Automated Transportation (CCAT), Purdue and co-advised by Prof. Sikai Chen at Sky-Lab.

My research centers on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in transportation and Intelligent Autonomous Systems, with a particular focus on autonomous driving, human-in-the-loop AI, human-robot interaction, reinforcement learning, multimodal large language models, transfer learning, spatiotemporal data mining, and traffic safety.

I aim to bridge the gap between theoretical advancements and practical applications, creating innovative AI systems that not only advance academic understanding but also transform real-world transportation, contributing to smarter, safer, and more sustainable mobility solutions for the future.

news

Apr 26, 2025	👏 I attended the 11th Midwest Workshop on Control and Game Theory (MWCGT) in UIUC!
Jan 06, 2025	👏 I visited Google!
Jan 05, 2025	👏 I attended the 2025 TRB Annual Meeting!
Aug 12, 2024	👏 I joined Purdue.
Jul 09, 2024	👏 I graduated from BJUT.

selected publications

Preprint

VL-SAFE: Vision-Language Guided Safety-Aware Reinforcement Learning with World Models for Autonomous Driving

Yansong Qu, Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, and 3 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.16377, 2025

Bib HTML PDF

@article{qu2025vlsafe,
  title = {VL-SAFE: Vision-Language Guided Safety-Aware Reinforcement Learning with World Models for Autonomous Driving},
  author = {Qu, Yansong and Huang, Zilin and Sheng, Zihao and Chen, Jiancong and Sikai, Chen and Samuel, Labi},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.16377},
  year = {2025},
}

CVPR Workshop

Talk2Traffic: Interactive and Editable Traffic Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving with Multimodal Large Language Model

Zihao Sheng, Zilin Huang, Yansong Qu, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2025

Bib HTML

@article{sheng2025Talk2Traffic,
  title = {Talk2Traffic: Interactive and Editable Traffic Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving with Multimodal Large Language Model},
  author = {Sheng, Zihao and Huang, Zilin and Qu, Yansong and Leng, Yue and Chen<sup></sup>, Sikai},
  journal = {In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops},
  year = {2025},
  github = {https://github.com/zihaosheng/Talk2Traffic},
}

Preprint

CurricuVLM: Towards Safe Autonomous Driving via Personalized Safety-Critical Curriculum Learning with Vision-Language Models

Zihao Sheng⁺, Zilin Huang⁺, Yansong Qu, and 3 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.15119, 2025

Bib HTML PDF

@article{sheng2025curricuvlm,
  title = {CurricuVLM: Towards Safe Autonomous Driving via Personalized Safety-Critical Curriculum Learning with Vision-Language Models},
  author = {Sheng<sup>+</sup>, Zihao and Huang<sup>+</sup>, Zilin and Qu, Yansong and Leng, Yue and Bhavanam, Sruthi and Chen<sup></sup>, Sikai},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.15119},
  year = {2025},
  github = {https://github.com/zihaosheng/CurricuVLM},
}

Preprint

VLM-RL: A Unified Vision Language Models and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Safe Autonomous Driving

Zilin Huang⁺, Zihao Sheng⁺, Yansong Qu⁺, and 2 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.15544, 2024

Bib HTML PDF

@article{huang2024vlmrl,
  title = {VLM-RL: A Unified Vision Language Models and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Safe Autonomous Driving},
  author = {Huang<sup>+</sup>, Zilin and Sheng<sup>+</sup>, Zihao and Qu<sup>+</sup>, Yansong and You, Junwei and Chen<sup></sup>, Sikai},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.15544},
  year = {2024},
  github = {https://github.com/zihaosheng/VLM-RL},
}