👨‍🎓 About Me

Hi! I am currently a Ph.D. student in Transportation Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Prof. Sikai Chen. Before that, I received my master’s from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and bachelor’s from Xi’an Jiaotong University.

My research centers on leveraging foundation models and reinforcement learning to enhance autonomous driving performance. I am currently interested in multimodal large language models and driving world models for safe autonomous driving.

🔥 News

• 2025.06: I will attend CVPR 2025 to present on our latest work Talk2Traffic 🎉🎉
• 2025.05: Honored to be selected as one of four UW–Madison nominees for the Google PhD Fellowship 🙌
• 2025.03: We are invited by Li Auto Autonomous Driving Team to give a talk on our recent project VLM-RL 🎉🎉

📝 Selected Publications view all

Preprint

SafePLUG: Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Pixel-Level Insight and Temporal Grounding for Traffic Accident Understanding

Zihao Sheng, Zilin Huang, Yen-Jung Chen, Yansong Qu, Yuhao Luo, Yue Leng, Sikai Chen

Preprint, 2025

Webpage PDF

CVPRW

Talk2Traffic: Interactive and Editable Traffic Scenario Generation for Autonomous Driving with Multimodal Large Language Model

Zihao Sheng, Zilin Huang, Yansong Qu, Yue Leng, Sikai Chen

CVPR 2025 WDFM-AD

Webpage PDF

Preprint

CurricuVLM: Towards Safe Autonomous Driving via Personalized Safety-Critical Curriculum Learning with Vision-Language Models

Zihao Sheng*, Zilin Huang*, Yansong Qu, Yue Leng, Sruthi Bhavanam, Sikai Chen

Preprint, 2025

Webpage PDF Code

TR-C

VLM-RL: A Unified Vision Language Models and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Safe Autonomous Driving

Zilin Huang*, Zihao Sheng*, Yansong Qu*, Junwei You, Sikai Chen

Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 2025

Webpage PDF Code

COMMTR

Traffic expertise meets residual RL: Knowledge-informed model-based residual reinforcement learning for CAV trajectory control

Zihao Sheng, Zilin Huang, Sikai Chen

Communications in Transportation Research, 2024

Webpage PDF Code

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2025 Google PhD Fellowship – University Nominee
• 2023 Student Research Grants Competition (SRGC) Award of University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 2022 Best Dissertation Award of Shanghai Association of Automation (SAA)
• 2022 Outstanding Master Graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University

📖 Educations

• 2023.01 - Present, PhD, Univerity of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA
• 2019.09 - 2022.03, MS, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
• 2015.09 - 2019.06, BS, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China

💡 Services

• Reviewer for Conferences (ICCV, AAAI, ITSC, SMC, TRB) and Journals (RA-L, TR-C, T-ITS, T-VT, T-IV, T-MC, AAP).
• Spring 2025, TA, CEE 370 Transportation Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Spring 2024, TA, CEE 370 Transportation Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Fall 2020, TA, Digital Signal Processing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University