Short Bio

Hi! I am Yimeng Liu, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. My research focuses on Embodied AI and Physical AI, aiming to build intelligent systems that can perceive, reason, and act in the physical world. I study how agents can form world models from multi-modal sensory inputs including vision and wireless sensing and use them to support long-horizon, safety-critical decision-making in real-world environments.

Research focus:

• LLM-Driven Cognitive Perception and Decision-Making for Driving) I study how large language models can be integrated with multi-modal perception to enable semantic reasoning, risk awareness, and cognitive decision-making in driving scenarios, with evaluation in simulation-to-real environments such as CARLA.
• Physical AI and World Modeling under Sparse and Multimodal Sensing I develop physics-informed learning frameworks for mmWave/SAR imaging and multimodal sensing, enabling robust 3D reconstruction and world modeling when observations are sparse, noisy, or physically ill-posed.
• Closed-Loop Physical AI Systems for Human-Centered and Agricultural Applications I build end-to-end AIoT systems that combine intelligent sensing, reinforcement learning, and physical simulation to support long-horizon, resource-aware decision-making in human-centered autonomy and intelligent agriculture.

I have published in ACM MobiCom (2024), IEEE INFOCOM (2025), and ACM SenSys (2025). My recent work focuses on robust multimodal sensing, LLM- and reinforcement learning–based cognitive-aware driving assistance, and cross-modality knowledge distillation for reliable perception under adverse and partially observable conditions.

News

• [Jul. 2025] Our paper, Hydra-Bench, is published on arxiv.
• [Jul. 2025] My story has been highlighted by MSUTODAY
• [Mar. 2025] Our paper Proteus has been accepted at SenSys'25.
• [Dec. 2024] Our paper Adonis and AeroEcho has been accepted at INFOCOM'25.
• [Oct. 2024] Invited talk at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa.
• [Aug. 2024] Our paper has been accepted at MobiCom'24.
• [Aug. 2024] Attended the NSF workshop on Substantial Computing at Purdue University.
• [May. 2023] Pursuing a Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Dr. Zhichao Cao at Michigan State University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
• [June. 2023] Our paper has been accepted at MobiSys'23. Check it out here.
• [May. 2023] Graduated from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics!
• [Aug. 2022] Our paper has been accepted by Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. Check it out here.
• [May. 2022] Summer Research Intern at EIN Lab under the supervision of Dr. Zhichao Cao.
• [Oct. 2020] Undergraduate Research under the supervision of Dr. Rolf Müller.

Publications [Google Scholar]