Portrait of Jiazhi Yang

Jiazhi Yang 杨佳智

Ph.D. Student · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · MMLab

I am a Ph.D. student in Information Engineering at CUHK MMLab, advised by Prof. Xiangyu Yue. Meanwhile, I am a research intern at OpenDriveLab, advised by Prof. Hongyang Li.

Research focus: Building autonomous, adaptive, and scalable self-improving embodied agents, through the lens of physical interactions and world models.

Research Interests

Scalable World ModelingEfficient Decision MakingVisual IntelligenceGeneralizable Policy

News

Selected Publications

First/co-first author, Main contributor

Teaser figure for RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model

RISE: Self-Improving Robot Policy with Compositional World Model

Jiazhi Yang*†, Kunyang Lin*, Jinwei Li*, Wencong Zhang*, Tianwei Lin, Longyan Wu, Zhizhong Su, Hao Zhao, Ya-Qin Zhang, Li Chen, Ping Luo, Xiangyu Yue, Hongyang Li. (* equal contribution; † project lead)
✨ RSS 2026World Models for Self-Improvement

Scalable robotic reinforcement learning framework that shifts policy improvement from costly physical interactions to imaginary rollouts in a compositional world model.

Teaser figure for SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scale SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scale

SimScale: Learning to Drive via Real-World Simulation at Scale

Haochen Tian, Tianyu Li, Haochen Liu, Jiazhi Yang, Yihang Qiu, Guang Li, Junli Wang, Yinfeng Gao, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Hangjun Ye, Tieniu Tan, Long Chen, Hongyang Li.
🌟 CVPR 2026 OralSimulation for Safety-Critical Data

Real-world simulation framework that synthesizes diverse, high-fidelity, reactive driving states from existing logs and scales end-to-end planner training with simulated data.

Teaser figure for PlannerRFT: Reinforcing Diffusion Planners through Closed-Loop and Sample-Efficient Fine-Tuning PlannerRFT: Reinforcing Diffusion Planners through Closed-Loop and Sample-Efficient Fine-Tuning

PlannerRFT: Reinforcing Diffusion Planners through Closed-Loop and Sample-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Hongchen Li, Tianyu Li, Jiazhi Yang, Haochen Tian, Caojun Wang, Lei Shi, Mingyang Shang, Zengrong Lin, Gaoqiang Wu, Zhihui Hao, Xianpeng Lang, Jia Hu, Hongyang Li.
✨ CVPR 2026Diffusion Policy with RL Fine-tuning

Closed-loop reinforcement fine-tuning framework for diffusion planners, using scenario-adaptive exploration and a fast simulator for sample-efficient policy improvement.

Teaser figure for Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability

Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability

✨ NeurIPS 2024World Model with Scene & Action Generalization

A generalizable driving world model for high-fidelity video prediction, long-horizon future rollout, multi-modal control, and action-aware reward estimation.

Teaser figure for Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Driving Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Driving

Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Driving

🌟 CVPR 2024 HighlightLarge Driving Video Dataset

A billion-scale predictive model for autonomous driving, pre-trained on massive youtube driving clips and evaluated for zero-shot generalization across unseen datasets and tasks.

Teaser figure for Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving

Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving

Yihan Hu*, Jiazhi Yang*, Li Chen*, Keyu Li*, Chonghao Sima, Xizhou Zhu, Siqi Chai, Senyao Du, Tianwei Lin, Wenhai Wang, Lewei Lu, Xiaosong Jia, Qiang Liu, Jifeng Dai, Yu Qiao, Hongyang Li. (* equal contribution)
🏆 CVPR 2023 Best Paper AwardEnd-to-end, Multi-tasking Driving Policy

Planning-oriented autonomous driving framework that unifies perception, prediction, and planning with end-to-end training for safer closed-loop autonomy.

Professional Service

Contributed Talks

Planning-oriented Autonomous Driving, Tsinghua University, May 2023.
Pathways of Igniting World Models in Intelligent Autonomy, KUIS AI Center, Oct 2025.

Reviewer

RSS, CVPR, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, T-PAMI, and related venues.