About me

I am a CS PhD student at UIUC, advised by Prof. Tong Zhang and Prof. Huan Zhang. Previously, I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University and CSE, HKUST. Currently, my research focuses on: Embodied Agents, Trustworthy LLMs/VLMs, and Improving the robustness and generalization abilities of deep RL.

Prior to my PhD, I am fortunate to have been working closely with Prof. Chongjie Zhang (Washington University in St. Louis), Dr. Lei Han (Tencent AI Lab), and Prof. Meng Fang (University of Liverpool).

News

• 🌟 (2025.02) We released EmbodiedBench, a new comprehensive and multifaceted benchmark for embodied agents. Check out our paper and project page.
• 🎉 (2025.1) Robust Decision Transformer and DynaMath are accepted by ICLR 2025! New versions will be updated soon.
• 🌟 (2024.10) A dynamic visual math benchmark is out! Check the project page and the DynaMath paper.
• 🎉 (2024.9) GRM is accepted by NeurIPS 2024! Check out our GRM series here.
• 🎉 (2024.5) Rewards-in-Context (RiC) is accepted by ICML 2024! Thanks to my co-authors!
• 🎉 (2024.5) GOPlan is accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)!
• 🎉 (2024.1) Robust IQL is accepted by ICLR 2024 as a spotlight paper!

Selected Publications

Embodied Agents

• EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents. Preprint, 2025. [code] [website]
  Rui Yang$^*$, Hanyang Chen $^*$, Junyu Zhang $^*$, Mark Zhao $^*$, Cheng Qian, Kangrui Wang, Qineng Wang, Teja Venkat Koripella, Marziyeh Movahedi, Manling Li, Heng Ji, Huan Zhang, Tong Zhang

RL for LLMs

• Regularizing Hidden States Enables Learning Generalizable Reward Model for LLMs. NeurIPS 2024. [code]
  Rui Yang, Ruomeng Ding, Yong Lin, Huan Zhang, Tong Zhang.

• Rewards-in-Context: Multi-objective Alignment of Foundation Models with Dynamic Preference Adjustment. ICML 2024. [code]
  Rui Yang $^*$, Xiaoman Pan $^*$, Feng Luo $^*$, Shuang Qiu $^*$, Han Zhong, Dong Yu, Jianshu Chen.

Evaluation of VLMs

• DynaMath: A Dynamic Visual Benchmark for Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Robustness of Vision Language Models. ICLR 2025. [code] [website]
  Chengke Zou $^*$, Xingang Guo $^*$, Rui Yang $^*$, Junyu Zhang, Bin Hu, Huan Zhang.

Robust Offline RL

• Robust Decision Transformer: Tackling Data Corruption in Offline RL via Sequence Modeling. ICLR 2025.
  Jiawei Xu $^*$, Rui Yang $^*$, Shuang Qiu, Feng Luo, Meng Fang, Baoxiang Wang, Lei Han.

• Towards Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning under Diverse Data Corruption. ICLR 2024. (Spotlight) [code]
  Rui Yang $^*$, Han Zhong $^*$, Jiawei Xu $^*$, Amy Zhang, Chongjie Zhang, Lei Han, Tong Zhang.

• Corruption-Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning with General Function Approximation. NeurIPS 2023. [code]
  Chenlu Ye $^*$, Rui Yang $^*$, Quanquan Gu, Tong Zhang.

• RORL: Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning via Conservative Smoothing. NeurIPS 2022. (Spotlight) [code]
  Rui Yang $^*$, Chenjia Bai $^*$, Xiaoteng Ma, Zhaoran Wang, Chongjie Zhang, Lei Han.

Goal-conditioned RL

• What Is Essential for Unseen Goal Generalization of Offline Goal-conditioned RL?. ICML 2023. [code]
  Rui Yang, Yong Lin, Xiaoteng Ma, Hao Hu, Chongjie Zhang, Tong Zhang.

• Rethinking Goal-conditioned Supervised Learning and Its Connection to Offline RL. ICLR 2022. [code]
  Rui Yang, Yiming Lu, Wenzhe Li, Hao Sun, Meng Fang, Yali Du, Xiu Li, Lei Han, Chongjie Zhang.

• GOPlan: Goal-conditioned Offline Reinforcement Learning by Planning with Learned Models. TMLR 2024.
  Mianchu Wang $^*$, Rui Yang $^*$, Xi Chen, Hao Sun, Meng Fang, Giovanni Montana.

Experiences

• Research Internships at Tencent AI Lab and Robotics X Lab

• ML Internship at Meituan Financial Service Group

Services

Conference Reviewer: ICML (22,24, 25), ICLR (24, 25), NeurIPS (22,23 $\color{red}{\text{Top Reviewer}}$, 24), ICRA (23), AAMAS(24).

Journal Reviewer: IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI), Machine Learning, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

Teaching Assistant: COMP 4211 Machine Learning, HKUST; COMP 1021 Introduction to Computer Science, HKUST

Hobbies

In my leisure time, I enjoy sports like running, table tennis, and swimming. During my time at Tsinghua University, I was an amateur long-distance runner. In 2019, I completed a half marathon (21.0975 km) in 1 h 30 m and a full marathon (42.195 km) in 3 h 36 m.