Yun Li

JSPS Research Fellow

Website: yun-li.pages.dev/en/
Email: li-yun@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Yun Li received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo in September 2026, under the supervision of Prof. Manabu Tsukada. His research focuses on safe and efficient decision-making for autonomous driving, including diffusion-based trajectory planning and safety alignment of vision-language-action (VLA) models via preference learning, with closed-loop validation and real-vehicle deployment on Autoware/AWSIM. During his Ph.D., he was a JSPS Research Fellow (DC2) and a Student Researcher at TIER IV.

Publications (12)

Int'l conferenceCARE: Camera-Residual Reserves for First Sightings in Adaptive LiDAR Sensing

Jiachen Gong, Yun Li, Ehsan Javanmardi, Wencan Mao, Manabu Tsukada — The 18th Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV 2026), Osaka, Japan, 2026

Int'l conferenceTo Route or to Adapt? Multi-Expert Diffusion Planners in Unseen Regions

Yun Li, Ehsan Javanmardi, Simon Thompson, Jiachen Gong, Qunli Zhang, Zifan Zeng, Shiming Liu, Peng Wang, Yidu Zhang, Manabu Tsukada — Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2026), Austin, Texas, USA, 2026

PosterNL2TL-Tree: Natural Language to Nested Temporal-Logic Trees for Robustness-Guided Flow-Matching Planning

Jiachen Gong, Wencan Mao, Ehsan Javanmardi, Yun Li, Quanxi Zhou, Manabu Tsukada — Companion of the 2026 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and the 2026 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC '26), Poster, Shanghai, China, 2026

ThesisPreference-Aligned Generative Models for Safe and Efficient Autonomous Driving: Vision-Language-Action Models and Real-Time Diffusion Planning

Yun Li — Ph.D Thesis, The University of Tokyo, 2026

JournalCausal Scene Narration: Inference-Time Text Restructuring for Vision-Language-Action Driving

Yun Li, Yidu Zhang, Simon Thompson, Ehsan Javanmardi, Manabu Tsukada — Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2026

Int'l conferenceAn Open-Source Modular Benchmark for Diffusion-Based Motion Planning in Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving

Yun Li, Simon Thompson, Yidu Zhang, Ehsan Javanmardi, Manabu Tsukada — The IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC2026), Naples, Italy, 2026

Workshop / WiPLearning Diffusion Planners from World Feedback: A No-Go Result on Bit-Exact Safety Rewards and an ODD-Adaptive Shared/Expert Decomposition

Yun Li, Ehsan Javanmardi, Yidu Zhang, Simon Thompson, Qunli Zhang, Zifan Zeng, Shiming Liu, Peng Wang, Zixuan Guo, Manabu Tsukada — Workshop on Reinforcement Learning from World Feedback (RLxF) at Forty-Third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), Seoul, South Korea, 2026

Domestic正則化付き多重選好学習による自動運転VLAモデルの安全制約アライメント

Yun Li, Simon Thompson, Ehsan Javanmardi, Alex Orsholits, 塚田学 — 人工知能学会全国大会（JSAI 2026）, 群馬, 2026

Int'l conferenceMulti-PrefDrive: Optimizing Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving Through Multi-Preference Tuning

Yun Li, Ehsan Javanmardi, Simon Thompson, Kai Katsumata, Alex Orsholits, Manabu Tsukada — 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Hangzhou, China, 2025

Int'l conferencePrefDrive: Enhancing Autonomous Driving through Preference-Guided Large Language Models

Yun Li, Ehsan Javanmardi, Simon Thompson, Kai Katsumata, Alex Orsholits, Manabu Tsukada — 36th IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV2025), Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2025

Int'l conferenceLarge Language Models for Human-like Autonomous Driving Decision Making: A Survey

Yun Li, Kai Katsumata, Ehsan Javanmardi, Manabu Tsukada — 27th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2024), Edmonton, Canada, 2024

JournalA Survey on Recent Advancements in Autonomous Driving Using Deep Reinforcement Learning: Applications, Challenges, and Solutions

Rui Zhao, Yun Li, Yuze Fan, Fei Gao, Manabu Tsukada, Zhenhai Gao — IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2024