Shaoyuan Xie

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California, Irvine advised by Prof. Alfred Chen. I received my B.Eng. degree in Automation at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

My work focuses on the safety and security of physical AI systems.

Email / CV / Google Scholar / X / LinkedIn / Github

News

[06/2026] - One paper is accepted by ECCV 2026.
[06/2026] - One paper is accepted by IROS 2026.
[02/2026] - I advanced to Ph.D. candidate. 🥳
[11/2025] - I will join Waymo as a Research Intern in summer 2026.
[08/2025] - One paper wins the Best Demo Award at USENIX VehicleSec 2025.
[08/2025] - Two papers are accepted by NDSS 2026.
[06/2025] - One paper is accepted by ICCV 2025.
[04/2025] - I will join MBRDNA as a Research Intern in summer 2025.
[03/2025] - We are hosting The RoboSense Challenge at IROS 2025.
[01/2025] - One paper is accepted by T-PAMI.
[01/2025] - One paper is accepted by ICLR 2025.

Earlier news

[08/2024] - One paper is accepted by NDSS 2025.
[12/2023] - One paper is accepted by TMLR.
[11/2023] - We are hosting The RoboDrive Challenge at ICRA 2024.
[09/2023] - One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2023.
[06/2023] - I will join OpenMMLab at Shanghai AI Lab as an intern , during summer 2023.
[03/2023] - I will join University of California, Irvine in 2023 Fall as a PhD student in Computer Science.
[11/2022] - We are organizing the RoboDepth Competition at ICRA 2023.
[05/2022] - I will join CCVL at Johns Hopkins University as a research intern, during summer 2022.

Selected Publications [full list]

	SafeDriveVLA: Navigation-Conditioned World Model Dreaming for Conflict-Aware End-to-End Autonomous Driving Shaoyuan Xie, Zihan Zhang, Jingxuan Wang, Jiashu Qu, Xiaoqing Liang, Lingdong Kong, Junchi Lu, Henrik I Christensen, Qi Alfred Chen * Equal Contribution Under Review paper
	BEVLM: Distilling Semantic Knowledge from Large Language Models into Bird's-Eye View Representations Thomas Monninger, Shaoyuan Xie, Qi Alfred Chen, Sihao Ding * Equal Contribution (order determined alphabetically) European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2026 paper
	Adversarial Spatial Transform Marker: A Black-Box Pose Estimation Attack for Autonomous UAV Landing Junchi Lu, Fayzah Alshammari, Shaoyuan Xie, Xiaoqing Liang, Qi Alfred Chen IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026 paper
	FlyTrap: Physical Distance-Pulling Attack Towards Camera-based Autonomous Target Tracking Systems Shaoyuan Xie, Mohamad Fakih, Junchi Lu, Fayzah Alshammari, Ningfei Wang, Takami Sato, Halima Bouzidi, Mohammad Al Faruque, Qi Alfred Chen Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2026 paper / slides / code / project / conference talk highlight video / video playlist Media coverage: UCI News, Tom's Hardware, Yahoo Tech, Heise Online, Tech Xplore, Interesting Engineering, DroneXL, DroneLife, 新智元 (AI Era), etc.
	The Heat is On: Understanding and Mitigating Vulnerabilities of Thermal Image Perception in Autonomous Systems Hrushikesh Varma, Shaoyuan Xie, Michael Clifford, Qi Alfred Chen, Takeshi Sugawara, Sara Rampazzi Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2026 paper / slides / project / conference talk
	Are VLMs Ready for Autonomous Driving? An Empirical Study from the Reliability, Data, and Metric Perspectives Shaoyuan Xie, Lingdong Kong, Yuhao Dong, Chonghao Sima, Wenwei Zhang, Qi Alfred Chen, Ziwei Liu, Liang Pan International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025 paper / code / project / poster / video talk [Chinese]
	Can We Trust Embodied Agents? Exploring Backdoor Attacks against Embodied LLM-based Decision-Making Systems Ruochen Jiao, Shaoyuan Xie, Justin Yue, Takami Sato, Lixu Wang, Yixuan Wang, Qi Alfred Chen, Qi Zhu * Equal Contribution International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025 paper / code / project / poster
	Benchmarking and Improving Bird's Eye View Perception Robustness in Autonomous Driving Shaoyuan Xie, Lingdong Kong, Wenwei Zhang, Jiawei Ren, Liang Pan, Kai Chen, Ziwei Liu IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI) paper / code / project / video talk [Chinese]
	Revisiting Physical-World Adversarial Attack on Traffic Sign Recognition: A Commercial Systems Perspective Ningfei Wang, Shaoyuan Xie, Takami Sato, Yunpeng Luo, Kaidi Xu, Qi Alfred Chen Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2025 paper / project / slides / conference talk
	On the Adversarial Robustness of Camera-based 3D Object Detection Shaoyuan Xie, Zichao Li, Zeyu Wang, Cihang Xie Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2024 paper / code
	Benchmarking Out-of-Distribution Depth Estimation under Corruptions Lingdong Kong, Shaoyuan Xie, Hanjiang Hu, Benoit Cottereau, Lai Xing Ng, Wei Tsang Ooi Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023 paper / code / project / poster

Technical Report

	AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide Awesome AI Auto-Research Team arXiv, 2026 technical report / code / project
	The RoboSense Challenge IROS Competition, 2025 technical report / website
	The RoboDrive Challenge ICRA Competition, 2024 technical report / website
	The RoboDepth Challenge ICRA Competition, 2023 technical report / website

Experience

Waymo
Research Intern
June 2026 - September 2026
Mentor: Chen Song, Hao Xiang

Mercedes-Benz R&D North America
Research Intern
June 2025 - September 2025
Mentor: Thomas Monninger, Sihao Ding

OpenMMLab @ Shanghai AI Lab
Research Intern
June 2023 - August 2023
Mentor: Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen

CCVL @ Johns Hopkins University
Research Intern
Summer 2022
Mentor: Cihang Xie, Alan Yuille

VLAA @ UC, Santa Cruz
Research Intern
Summer 2022
Mentor: Cihang Xie

Honors and Awards

Best Demo Award, USENIX VehicleSec 2025.
Jim Trolinger Graduate Student Award Endowment, UC Irvine, 2025.
Dean's Fellowship, UC Irvine, 2023.
Honours Degrees, HUST (Top 3%), 2023.
National Scholarship, (Top 0.2% national-wide), 2020 and 2021.
Outstanding Undergraduate Student, HUST (Top 1%), 2020.

Professional Services

Program Committee: ACM CCS (Artifact Evaluation), 2024 to 2025; NDSS (Artifact Evaluation), 2026
Conference Reviewer: CVPR, 2023 to 2026; ICCV, 2025; ECCV, 2026; ICLR, 2026; NeurIPS, 2026; BMVC, 2026; IROS, 2026; CoRL, 2026
Journal Reviewer: IJCV; RA-L; TDSC; TMLR; TMM
External Reviewer: USENIX Security, 2024 to 2025; IEEE S&P, 2024; ACM CCS, 2024

Teaching

Teaching Assistant: I&C SCI 31, Introduction to Programming, 2023 Fall

Stolen from Jon Barron