[Johnson :)]
Johnson Tsun-Hsuan Wang
PhD, MIT CSAIL
Email: tsunw (at) mit (dot) edu
Biography
Johnson Tsun-Hsuan Wang (王尊玄) is final-year PhD at MIT CSAIL, advised by Prof. Daniela Rus. I am also a part-time researcher at Liquid AI. I got my bachelor and master degree at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Additionally, I did internships at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Uber ATG, and Academia Sinica.
News
  • One papers accepted at ICRA 2025!!
  • Two papers accepted at ICLR 2025!!
  • Genesis is released. Have fun and we welcome contribution from everyone!!
Research Highlights
My research focuses on building intelligence that can interact with the physical world. I am taking a more comprehensive view from the aspects of data, brain, and body toward scalability, reliability, and explicit consideration of physical embodiment. Specifically,
  • Data: Data is the fuel of highly capable AI systems, making its quality and relevance essential. By reverse engineering the generative processes behind physical data, my research aims to mitigate the challenge of sourcing physical data while enabling more scalable and effective evaluation.
  • Brain: The brain is undeniably the core of AI systems, requiring a deep understanding of the physical world and reliable interaction with it. To achieve this, my research integrates control-theoretic modules for certifiability while combining knowledge-based and physics-based reasoning to bridge the generalization of digital AI to the physical world.
  • Body: Beyond the behavioral intelligence achieved through data and the brain, morphological intelligence (the body) plays a crucial role in physical interaction and can emerge through computation. My research focuses on grounding generative AI in physical embodiment and enhance its physical utility by leveraging feedback from evaluations conducted in physics-based simulations.
  • @inproceedings{
    	nguyen2025regen,
    	title={ReGen: Generative Robot Simulation via Inverse Design},
    	author={Phat Tan Nguyen and Tsun-Hsuan Wang and Zhang-Wei Hong and Erfan Aasi and Andrew Silva and Guy Rosman and Sertac Karaman and Daniela Rus},
    	booktitle={The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
    	year={2025},
    	url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=EbCUbPZjM1}
    }
    @inproceedings{amini2022vista,
    	title={Generative-AI-Driven Jumping Robot Design Using Diffusion Models},
    	author={Kim, Byungchul and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Rus, Daniela},
    	booktitle={2025 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
    	year={2025},
    	organization={IEEE}
    }
    @article{xiao2023safediffuser,
      title={SafeDiffuser: Safe Planning with Diffusion Probabilistic Models},
      author={Xiao, Wei and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Gan, Chuang and Rus, Daniela},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.00148},
      year={2023}
    }
    @inproceedings{
    	lin2024ubsoft,
    	title={{UBS}oft: A Simulation Platform for Robotic Skill Learning in Unbounded Soft Environments},
    	author={Chunru Lin and Jugang Fan and Yian Wang and Zeyuan Yang and Zhehuan Chen and Lixing Fang and Tsun-Hsuan Wang and Zhou Xian and Chuang Gan},
    	booktitle={8th Annual Conference on Robot Learning},
    	year={2024},
    	url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=7vzDBvviRO}
    }
    @inproceedings{
    	wang2024architect,
    	title={Architect: Generating Vivid and Interactive 3D Scenes with Hierarchical 2D Inpainting},
    	author={Yian Wang and Xiaowen Qiu and Jiageng Liu and Zhehuan Chen and Jiting Cai and Yufei Wang and Tsun-Hsuan Wang and Zhou Xian and Chuang Gan},
    	booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
    	year={2024},
    	url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=JHg9eNuw6p}
    }
    @article{nguyen2024text,
      title={Text-to-Drive: Diverse Driving Behavior Synthesis via Large Language Models},
      author={Nguyen, Phat and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Hong, Zhang-Wei and Karaman, Sertac and Rus, Daniela},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.04300},
      year={2024}
    }
    @inproceedings{ma2024llm,
      title={LLM and Simulation as Bilevel Optimizers: A New Paradigm to Advance Physical Scientific Discovery},
      author={Ma, Pingchuan and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Guo, Minghao and Sun, Zhiqing and Tenenbaum, Joshua B and Rus, Daniela and Gan, Chuang and Matusik, Wojciech},
      booktitle={International Conference on Machine Learning},
      year={2024},
      organization={PMLR}
    }
    @article{wang2023robogen,
      title={RoboGen: Towards Unleashing Infinite Data for Automated Robot Learning via Generative Simulation},
      author={Wang, Yufei and Xian, Zhou and Chen, Feng and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Wang, Yian and Fragkiadaki, Katerina and Erickson, Zackory and Held, David and Gan, Chuang},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.01455},
      year={2023}
    }
    @article{wang2023drive,
      title={Drive Anywhere: Generalizable End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Multi-modal Foundation Models},
      author={Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Maalouf, Alaa and Xiao, Wei and Ban, Yutong and Amini, Alexander and Rosman, Guy and Karaman, Sertac and Rus, Daniela},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.17642},
      year={2023}
    }
    @article{wang2023diffusebot,
    	title={{DiffuseBot}: Breeding Soft Robots With Physics-Augmented Generative Diffusion Models},
    	author={Wang, Tsun-Hsuan Johnson and Zheng, Juntian and Ma, Pingchuan and Du, Yilun and Kim, Byungchul and Spielberg, Andrew and Tenenbaum, Josh and Gan, Chuang and Rus, Daniela},
    	journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
    	volume={36},
    	year={2023}
    }
    @inproceedings{lechner2023gigastep,
      author={Mathias Lechner and Lianhao Yin and Tim Seyde and Tsun-Hsuan Wang and Wei Xiao and Ramin Hasani and Joshua Rountree and Daniela Rus},
      title={Gigastep - One Billion Steps per Second Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning},
      booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
      year={2023},
      url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=UgPAaEugH3}
    }
    @article{xian2023towards,
      title={Towards generalist robots: A promising paradigm via generative simulation},
      author={Xian, Zhou and Gervet, Theophile and Xu, Zhenjia and Qiao, Yi-Ling and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Wang, Yian},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.10455},
      year={2023}
    }
    @inproceedings{
      wang2023measuring,
      title={Measuring Interpretability of Neural Policies of Robots with Disentangled Representation},
      author={Tsun-Hsuan Wang and Wei Xiao and Tim Seyde and Ramin Hasani and Daniela Rus},
      booktitle={7th Annual Conference on Robot Learning},
      year={2023},
      url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=6kSohKYYTn0}
    }
    @inproceedings{zhang2023machine,
      title={Machine Learning Best Practices for Soft Robot Proprioception},
      author={Zhang, Annan and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Truby, Ryan L and Chin, Lillian and Rus, Daniela},
      booktitle={2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
      year={2023},
      organization={IEEE}
    }
    @inproceedings{xiao2023inv,
      title = {On the Forward Invariance of Neural ODEs},
      author = {Wei Xiao and Tsun-Hsuan Wang and Ramin Hasani and Mathias Lechner and Yutong Ban and Chuang Gan and Daniela Rus},
      booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
      year = {2023}
    }
    @inproceedings{
      wang2023softzoo,
      title={SoftZoo: A Soft Robot Co-design Benchmark For Locomotion In Diverse Environments},
      author={Tsun-Hsuan Wang and Pingchuan Ma and Andrew Everett Spielberg and Zhou Xian and Hao Zhang and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Daniela Rus and Chuang Gan},
      booktitle={The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations },
      year={2023},
      url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=Xyme9p1rpZw}
    }
    @article{hasani2022liquid,
      title={Liquid structural state-space models},
      author={Hasani, Ramin and Lechner, Mathias and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Chahine, Makram and Amini, Alexander and Rus, Daniela},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.12951},
      year={2022}
    }
    @inproceedings{wang2023learning,
      title={Learning stability attention in vision-based end-to-end driving policies},
      author={Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Xiao, Wei and Chahine, Makram and Amini, Alexander and Hasani, Ramin and Rus, Daniela},
      booktitle={Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference},
      pages={1099--1111},
      year={2023},
      organization={PMLR}
    }
    @article{xiao2023barriernet,
      title={Barriernet: Differentiable control barrier functions for learning of safe robot control},
      author={Xiao, Wei and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Hasani, Ramin and Chahine, Makram and Amini, Alexander and Li, Xiao and Rus, Daniela},
      journal={IEEE Transactions on Robotics},
      volume={39},
      number={3},
      pages={2289--2307},
      year={2023},
      publisher={IEEE}
    }
    @inproceedings{amini2022vista,
      title={Vista 2.0: An open, data-driven simulator for multimodal sensing and policy learning for autonomous vehicles},
      author={Amini, Alexander and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Gilitschenski, Igor and Schwarting, Wilko and Liu, Zhijian and Han, Song and Karaman, Sertac and Rus, Daniela},
      booktitle={2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
      pages={2419--2426},
      year={2022},
      organization={IEEE}
    }
    @inproceedings{wang2022learning,
      title={Learning interactive driving policies via data-driven simulation},
      author={Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Amini, Alexander and Schwarting, Wilko and Gilitschenski, Igor and Karaman, Sertac and Rus, Daniela},
      booktitle={2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
      pages={7745--7752},
      year={2022},
      organization={IEEE}
    }
    @article{tylkin2022interpretable,
      title={Interpretable Autonomous Flight via Compact Visualizable Neural Circuit Policies},
      author={Tylkin, Paul and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Palko, Kyle and Allen, Ross and Siu, Ho Chit and Wrafter, Daniel and Seyde, Tim Niklas and Amini, Alexander and Rus, Daniela},
      journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
      year={2022},
      publisher={IEEE}
    }
    @inproceedings{tylkin2022autonomous,
    	title={Autonomous Flight Arcade Challenge: Single-and Multi-Agent Learning Environments for Aerial Vehicles},
    	author={Tylkin, Paul and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Seyde, Tim and Palko, Kyle and Allen, Ross and Amini, Alexander and Rus, Daniela},
    	booktitle={Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems},
    	pages={1744--1746},
    	year={2022}
    }
    @InProceedings{Tu_2021_ICCV,
      author = {Tu, James and Wang, Tsunhsuan and Wang, Jingkang and Manivasagam, Sivabalan and Ren, Mengye and Urtasun, Raquel},
      title = {Adversarial Attacks on Multi-Agent Communication},
      booktitle = {ICCV},
      month = {October},
      year = {2021},
      pages = {7768-7777}
    }
    @inproceedings{wang2020v2vnet,
      Author = {Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Manivasagam, Sivabalan and Liang, Ming and Bin, Yang and Zeng, Wenyuan and Tu, James and Urtasun, Raquel},
      Title = {V2VNet: Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for Joint Perception and Prediction},
      Booktitle = {ECCV},
      Year = {2020}
    }
    @inproceedings{wang2019p2pvg,
      Author = {Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Cheng, Yen-Chi and Lin, Chieh Hubert and Chen, Hwann-Tzong and Sun, Min},
      Title = {Point-to-Point Video Generation},
      Booktitle = {ICCV},
      Year = {2019}
    }
    @inproceedings{wang2019ccvnorm,
      Author = {Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Hu, Hou-Ning and Lin, Chieh Hubert and Tsai, Yi-Hsuan and Chiu, Wei-Chen and Sun, Min},
      Title = {3D LiDAR and Stereo Fusion using Stereo Matching Network with Conditional Cost Volume Normalization},
      Booktitle = {IROS},
      Year = {2019}
    }
    @inproceedings{wang2019pnpdepth,
      Author = {Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Wang, Fu-En and Lin, Juan-Ting and Tsai, Yi-Hsuan and Chiu, Wei-Chen and Sun, Min},
      Title = {Plug-and-Play: Improve Depth Estimation via Sparse Data Propagation},
      Booktitle = {ICRA},
      Year = {2019}
    }
    @inproceedings{wu2019pouring,
      Author = {Wu, Tz-Ying and Lin, Juan-Ting and Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Hu, Chan-Wei and Niebles, Juan Carlos and Sun, Min},
      Title = {Liquid Pouring Monitoring via Rich Sensory Inputs},
      Booktitle = {ECCV},
      Year = {2018}
    }
    @inproceedings{wang2019omnicnn,
      Author = {Wang, Tsun-Hsuan and Huang, Hung-Jui and Lin, Juan-Ting and Hu, Chan-Wei and Zeng, Kuo-Hao and Sun, Min},
      Title = {Omnidirectional CNN for Visual Place Recognition and Navigation},
      Booktitle = {ICRA},
      Year = {2018}
    }