Bolei Zhou

Associate Professor
Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles
Office: 295D, Engineering VI, UCLA.
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My research is at the intersection of computer vision and robot learning, with a focus on developing efficient, interpretable, and generalizable AI agents that aligns with humans. I am also interested in understanding various human-centric properties of current AI models beyond their accuracy, such as explainability, interpretability, steerability, generalization, and safety. Some of the earlier works I co-authored are Class Activation Mapping (CAM), Places, ADE20K, Network Dissection. I have been honored with the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, Intel’s Rising Star Faculty Award, and MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Award.

See MetaDriverse for our recent work on robot learning and embodied AI.
See GenForce for our recent work on generative modeling and GenAI.

News

May 29, 2025 Check out our research activities at CVPR’25 in Nashville: (1) present three papers, Urban-Sim (Highlight), Vid2Sim, and MetaVQA; (2) give invited talks at Synthetic Data for Computer Vision Workshop, AVA: Accessbility, Vision, and Autonomy Workshop, and 4th Workshop on Uncertainty Quantification for Computer Vision; (3) co-organize Workshop on Populating Empty Cities and Workshop on Real-to-Sim: Bridging the Gap between Neural Rendering and Robot Learning.
Jan 23, 2025 Thank ONR for supporting our research via ONR Young Investigator Award, with news of UCLA, Samueli Engineering School, CS department.
Jul 31, 2024 Check out the newest urban environment simulator MetaUrban for embodied AI research in micromobility.
Jul 31, 2024 My talk record at CVPR’24 Workshop on Autonomous Driving summarizes our effort of building the open-source simulation platform MetaDriverse for AI research and mobility. Slide is available.
Jun 12, 2024 CVPR’2024: give invited talks at Workshop on Autonomous Driving (WAD) on 06/17 AM and Workshop on Robot Visual Perception in Human Crowded Environments on 06/18 PM, and co-organize Workshop on Populating Empty Cities on 06/17 PM.
Feb 13, 2024 Thank NSF for supporting our research via NSF CAREER Award.
Sep 12, 2023 Thank Intel for supporting our research via Intel’s 2023 Rising Star Faculty Award.
Apr 26, 2023 Invited talks at workshops on coPerception: collaborative perception and learning at ICRA’23, end-to-end autonomous driving at CVPR’23, and secure and safe autonomous driving at CVPR’23, and BIRS workshop on 3D generative models.
Mar 24, 2023 Grateful to receive NSF award for supporting our research of developing our MetaDrive driving simulator into MetaDriverse, an open-source infrastructure for AI research on autonomous driving.

Selected Publications

  1. NeurIPS Spotlight
    Predictive Preference Learning from Human Interventions
    Haoyuan Cai, Zhenghao Peng, and Bolei Zhou
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS Spotlight) , 2025
  2. NeurIPS
    Adv-BMT: Bidirectional Motion Transformer for Safety-Critical Traffic Scenario Generation
    Yuxin Liu, Zhenghao Peng, Xuanhao Cui, and Bolei Zhou
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) , 2025
  3. NeurIPS
    AutoVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Adaptive Reasoning and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
    Zewei Zhou, Tianhui Cai, Seth Z Zhao, Yun Zhang, Zhiyu Huang, Bolei Zhou, and Jiaqi Ma
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) , 2025
  4. ICCV
    X-fusion: Introducing new modality to frozen large language models
    Sicheng Mo, Thao Nguyen, Xun Huang, Siddharth Srinivasan Iyer, Yijun Li, Yuchen Liu, Abhishek Tandon, Eli Shechtman, Krishna Kumar Singh, Yong Jae Lee, and others
    International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) , 2025
  5. ICCV
    Occupancy Learning with Spatiotemporal Memory
    Ziyang Leng, Jiawei Yang, Wenlong Yi, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) , 2025
  6. ICML
    Robot-Gated Shared Autonomy with Adaptive Intervention Mechanism
    Haoyuan Cai, Zhenghao Peng, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , 2025
  7. CVPR Highlight
    Towards Autonomous Micromobility through Scalable Urban Simulation
    Wayne Wu*, Honglin He*, Chaoyuan Zhang, Jack He, Seth Z. Zhao, Ran Gong, Quanyi Li, and Bolei Zhou
    IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR Highlight) , 2025
  8. CVPR
    Vid2Sim: Realistic and Interactive Simulation from Video for Urban Navigation
    Ziyang Xie, Zhizheng Liu, Zhenghao Peng, Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou
    IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) , 2025
  9. CVPR
    Embodied Scene Understanding for Vision Language Models via MetaVQA
    Weizhen Wang, Chenda Duan, Zhenghao Peng, Yuxin Liu, and Bolei Zhou
    IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR) , 2025
  10. ICRA
    Data-Efficient Learning from Human Interventions for Mobile Robots
    Zhenghao Peng, Zhizheng Liu, and Bolei Zhou
    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) , 2025
  11. ICLR Spotlight
    MetaUrban: An Embodied AI Simulation Platform for Urban Micromobility
    Wayne Wu, Honglin He, Jack He, Yiran Wang, Chenda Duan, Zhizheng Liu, Quanyi Li, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR Spotlight) , 2025
  12. ICLR
    Learning to Generate Diverse Pedestrian Movements from Web Videos with Noisy Labels
    Zhizheng Liu, Joe Lin, Wayne Wu, and Bolei Zhou
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) , 2025
  13. Nature
    Experiment-free Exoskeleton Assistance via Learning in Simulation
    Shuzhen Luo, Menghan Jiang, Sainan Zhang, Junxi Zhu, Shuangyue Yu, Israel Dominguez Silva, Tian Wang, Elliott Rouse, Bolei Zhou, Hyunwoo Yuk, Xianlian Zhou, and Hao Su
    Nature , 2024