index.md

layout	title	permalink	pubs
page		/	title author journal url media NatSGLD: A Dataset with <ins>S</ins>peech, <ins>G</ins>estures, <ins>L</ins>ogic, and <ins>D</ins>emonstrations for Robot Learning in <ins>Nat</ins>ural Human-Robot Interaction Snehesh Shrestha, Yantian Zha, Ge Gao, Cornelia Fermuller, and Yiannis Aloimonos IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Data Paper), 2025 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02274 name url Project http://www.snehesh.com/natsgd/ title author journal url media Task Success is not Enough: Investigating the Use of VideoLanguage Models as Behavior Critics for Catching Undesirable Agent Behaviors Lin Guan, Yifan Zhou, Denis Liu, Yantian Zha, Heni Ben Amor, Subbarao Kambhampati Conference on Language Modeling 2024 https://openreview.net/forum?id=otKo4zFKmH#discussion name url Project https://guansuns.github.io/pages/vlm-critic/ title author journal url media Learning from Ambiguous Demonstrations with Self-Explanation Guided Reinforcement Learning Yantian Zha, Lin Guan, Subbarao Kambhampati AAA-24 Main Track & AAAI-22 Workshop on Reinforcement Learning in Games 2022. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.05286.pdf name url Website https://github.com/YantianZha/SERLfD name url Slides https://yantianzha.github.io/serlfd_slides/ title author journal url Symbols as a Lingua Franca for Bridging Human-AI Chasm for Explainable and Advisable AI Systems Subbarao Kambhampati, Sarath Sreedharan, Mudit Verma, Yantian Zha, Lin Guan AAAI Blue Sky Paper (Senior Member Presentation Track) 2022. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.09904.pdf title author journal url media Contrastively Learning Visual Attention as Affordance Cues from Demonstrations for Robotic Grasping Yantian Zha, Siddhant Bhambri, and Lin Guan The IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00878 name url Project https://sites.google.com/asu.edu/affordance-aware-imitation/project name url IROS_Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K71EAN5tNaI name url Slides https://yantianzha.github.io/AAIL_Slides/ title author journal url Plan-Recognition-Driven Attention Modeling for Visual Recognition Yantian Zha, Yikang Li, Tianshu Yu, Subbarao Kambhampati and Baoxin Li AAAI 2019 Workshop on Plan, Activity, and Intent Recognition (PAIR). https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.00301 title author journal url media Recognizing plans by learning embeddings from observed action distributions Yantian Zha, Yikang Li, Sriram Gopalakrishnan, Baoxin Li, and Subbarao Kambhampati In Proceedings of International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2018. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3238103 name url Full Paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01949 name url Code https://github.com/YantianZha/Distr2Vec name url Slides https://drive.google.com/open?id=19dSk2Qk2vEqwJXBzbN1XoQJIa-YdMGdY name url Poster https://drive.google.com/open?id=1suKUc865_NNMMnSSXEqJIA7gmjAKlOb2 title author journal url media Discovering Underlying Plans Based on Shallow Models Hankz Hankui Zhuo, Yantian Zha, Subbarao Kambhampati, and Xin Tian In Proceedings of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM-TIST) 2019. https://yochan-lab.github.io/papers/files/papers/hankz_tist_19.pdf name url Code https://github.com/YantianZha/Discovering-Underlying-Plans-Based-on-Shallow-Models title author journal url media Explicability as Minimizing Distance from Expected Behavior Anagha Kulkarni, Yantian Zha, Tathagata Chakraborti, Satya Gautam Vadlamudi, Yu Zhang and Subbarao Kambhampati In Proceedings of International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2019. https://yochan-lab.github.io/papers/files/papers/anagha-aamas-2019.pdf name url Full Paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05497 name url Demo Video https://youtu.be/iLG-ANQtYms

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Yantian was born in Nanjing, China. While Yantian started learning piano at three years old (and eventually obtained his 10-Level Piano Certificate{:target="_blank"}), Yantian is committed to Robotics (which is one of Yantian's childhood dreams). Yantian's robotics journey truly set out when he was an undergrad, worked with Prof. Xudong Ma{:target="_blank"} and Prof. Kun Qian{:target="_blank"} at the Institute of Intelligent Robotics and Intelligent Control, Southeast University. After that, Yantian went to Arizona State University and had a delighted Ph.D. life with his advisor Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati (Rao){:target="_blank"} (as clearly seen from the title of Yantian's Ph.D. Thesis{:target="_blank"}). Recently, Yantian becomes a Postdoctoral Associate and Adjunct Lecturer, collaborating with Prof. Miao Yu{:target="_blank"}, Prof. Bala Balachandran{:target="_blank"}, Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos{:target="_blank"}, Dr. Cornelia Fermüller{:target="_blank"}, Prof. Ming Lin{:target="_blank"}, and Prof. Tianyi Zhou{:target="_blank"} at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Research Interest:

Yantian is interested in Cognitive Robot Learning -- how different levels of cognitive functions like perception, acting, planning, and metacognition, can be tightly coupled to achieve human-level intelligence for robots.

Teaching:

2023 Spring: ENPM808Z Cognitive Robotics{:target="_blank"}

2023 Fall: CMSC421 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence{:target="_blank"}

2024 Spring: CMSC848J & ENPM808Z Cognitive Robotics

Please feel free to contact Yantian via ytzha at umd dot edu or LinkedIn{:target="_blank"}. For students who contact me and look for my supervision, I promise to read your emails. I would appreciate it if you could mention which of my papers or research directions you are interested in; please also feel free to suggest any other research directions that you would like us to explore together.

News!

12/02/2024: Our paper "NatSGLD: A Dataset with Speech, Gestures, Logic, and Demonstrations for Robot Learning in Natural Human-Robot Interaction{:target="_blank"} is accepted by HRI-25. Thanks to my collaborators!

08/22/24: I gave a faculty talk at the Maryland Research Day event

07/10/2024: Our paper "Task Success" is not Enough: Investigating the Use of Video-Language Models as Behavior Critics for Catching Undesirable Agent Behaviors{:target="_blank"} is accepted by COLM-24. Thanks to my collaborators!

07/03/2024: I gave an invited talk at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University: "Cognitively-Enhanced Robotic Manipulation across Sea, Air, and Land"

05/23/2024: I gave a faculty talk at Maryland Robotics Center Research Symposium 2024

12/09/2023: Our paper Learning from Ambiguous Demonstrations with Self-Explanation Guided Reinforcement Learning{:target="_blank"} is accepted by AAAI-24 Main Track. Thanks to my collaborators!

07/2023: Excited to announce our workshop Bridging the Gap between Cognitive Science and Robot Learning in the Real World: Progresses and New Directions at CoRL-23. Many thanks to my co-organizers!

04/2022: I am a recipient of the Maryland Robotics Center Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Systems Research (ISR), University of Maryland, 2022-2023.

06/30/2021: Our paper Contrastively Learning Visual Attention as Affordance Cues from Demonstrations for Robotic Grasping{:target="_blank"} is accepted by IROS 2021. Thanks to my collaborators!

04/30/2021: I am awarded the CIDSE Doctoral Fellowship by ASU.

03/2020 - 08/2020: Worked as a robotics research intern at ABB, Raleigh advised by Dr. Jianjun Wang.

Publications

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