[AI Seminar Series] Seminar by Jiaqi Ma, Friday April 3rd, 12-1pm, MRB Seminar Room

[Vassilis Tsotras]

The next AI Seminar will be on Friday April 3rd, 12-1pm, in the MRB Seminar
Room (1st floor).

The talk will be given by *Prof. Jiaqi Ma*, Department of Civil &
Environmental Engineering and Department of Computer Science, UCLA

*** Pizza and refreshments will be provided ****

To keep track of the number of attendees, please *register* at:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-seminar-series-tickets-1986095318562

TITLE: Physical AI for Autonomous Driving and Open-World Mobility: From
Structured Reasoning to Deployable Decision-to-Control

ABSTRACT:
Open-world mobility describes dynamic real-world environments in which
vehicles, robots, infrastructure, and people interact under partial
observability, distribution shift, long-tail events, and changing
operational conditions. These settings require AI systems that can jointly
perform perception, semantic reasoning, prediction, and closed-loop action
under real-time constraints. In this talk, I present our recent work on
physical AI for autonomous driving and open-world mobility, focusing on
model architectures and system designs that connect foundation models to
deployable autonomy. I begin with Driving with Regulation, which treats
traffic laws, norms, and safety guidance as structured inputs to
decision-making through retrieval-augmented regulation understanding. I
then present AutoVLA, a vision-language-action model for end-to-end
autonomous driving that unifies scene understanding, semantic reasoning,
and trajectory generation within a single autoregressive framework. Next, I
discuss a central systems problem for deployable VLA-based autonomy: the
temporal mismatch between slower high-level inference and fast,
safety-critical control. Our work explicitly models delayed semantic
updates during action generation and enables latency-aware integration of
reasoning and control in dynamic environments. Finally, I discuss our work
on multi-agent perception and prediction, including V2XPnP, to show how
these ideas extend beyond single-agent autonomy toward cooperative
intelligence. Overall, these efforts illustrate our pathway toward
scalable, trustworthy, and deployable physical AI systems that bridge
foundation models, structured reasoning, and real-world control for
open-world mobility.

Bio:
Dr. Jiaqi Ma is a professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering with
joint appointments in Civil & Environmental Engineering and Computer
Science, and he serves as Director of the FHWA/UCLA Center of Excellence on
New Mobility and Automated Vehicles. Dr. Ma’s research focuses on Physical
AI for autonomy, building foundation-model-driven systems that tightly
integrate multimodal perception, world modeling, semantic reasoning, and
closed-loop control for autonomous driving and mobile robotics. He has led
and managed a large portfolio of projects funded by the U.S. and state
Departments of Transportation, National Science Foundation, IARPA and
ARPA-I, as well as industry partners including NVIDIA, Motional, and
Amazon. Dr. Ma is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent
Transportation Systems. He also serves as Chair of the Transportation
Research Board (TRB) Standing Committee on Connected and Automated Vehicle
Systems and is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent
Transportation Systems Society.

------------------------------------
Sponsored by the RAISE at UCR Institute, the AI Seminar Series presents
speakers working on cutting edge Foundational AI or applying AI in their
research. The goal of these seminars is to inform the UCR community about
current trends in AI research and promote collaborations between faculty in
this emerging field. These seminars are open to interested faculty and
graduate/undergraduate students. Please forward this email to other
colleagues or students in your lab that may be interested. After the seminar a
discussion will follow for questions, open problems, ideas for possible
collaborations etc.

Sincerely,
Vassilis Tsotras
Professor, CSE Department
co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute

Amit Roy-Chowdhury
Professor, ECE Department
co-Director, RAISE at UCR Institute
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