I am currently a PhD student at Tongji University, where I am actively involved in the TOPS Lab. Under the guidance of Professor Jian Sun and Professor Peng Hang, I am pursuing research at the intersection of cutting-edge technologies in autonomous driving systems and artificial intelligence.
My research interests are primarily focused on autonomous driving, with a particular emphasis on decision-making processes, reinforcement learning techniques, and the application of foundation models. I am passionate about developing innovative solutions to improve safety, efficiency, and the overall user experience in autonomous systems.
🔥 News
- 2026.06: 🎉🎉 One paper(First author) is accepted by The Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems(NeurIPS).Code, Dataset, Project Page
- 2026.06: 🎉🎉 One paper(First author) is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems(SCI, Q1).Project Page
- 2026.05: 🎉🎉 One paper(First author) is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems(SCI, Q1).Project Page
- 2026.04: 🎉🎉 One paper(First author) is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology(SCI, Q1).Project Page
- 2026.04: 🎉🎉 One paper named Evaluation as Evolution: Transforming Adversarial Diffusion into Closed-Loop Curricula for Autonomous Vehicles is preprinted on Arvix.
- 2025.12: 🎉🎉 One paper named VP-AutoTest: A Virtual-Physical Fusion Autonomous Driving Testing Platform is preprinted on Arvix.
- 2025.12: 🎉🎉 Our latest review titled A Survey on End-to-End Autonomous Driving Training from the Perspectives of Data, Strategy, and Platform has been published on Techrxiv! Project Page
- 2025.11: 🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems(SCI, Q1).
- 2025.09: 🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics(SCI, Q1).
- 2025.09: 🎉🎉 One paper named A Knowledge-Driven Diffusion Policy for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Based on Expert Routing is preprinted on Arvix. Code, Project Page
- 2025.07: 🎉🎉 One paper named Interactive Adversarial Testing of Autonomous Vehicles with Adjustable Confrontation Intensity is preprinted on Arvix.
- 2025.07: 🎉🎉 Two papers (one as first author) are accepted by ITSC 2025, see 1 and 2.
- 2025.06: 🎓🎓 I received my Bachelor’s degree from Tongji University, recognized as Shanghai Outstanding Graduate (top 1%) with an Excellent Graduation Thesis!
- 2025.04: 🏆🏆 I received the Pursuing Excellence Student Award, the highest honor for undergraduates at Tongji University — awarded to only 6 students per year!
- 2025.02: 🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters(SCI, Q1).
- 2025.02: 🎉🎉 One paper (first author) named TeLL-Drive: Enhancing Autonomous Driving with Teacher LLM-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning is preprinted on Arvix.
- 2025.01: 🎉🎉 One paper named Recognize then Resolve: A Hybrid Framework for Understanding Interaction and Cooperative Conflict Resolution in Mixed Traffic is preprinted on Arvix.
- 2024.12: 🏆🏆 I was honored with the prestigious title of Academic Star of Tongji University, the highest academic distinction awarded to students at our university!This achievement has been reported in 1 and 2.
- 2024.05: 🏆🏆 I won the first prize of China Transportation Science and Technology Competition, which is the most important undergraduate academic competition in China’s transportation field! And the prize is the only one our school won in the same year!
📝 Publications
Chengkai Xu, Jiaqi Liu, Yicheng Guo, Peng Hang, Jian Sun, NeurIPS 2026. Code, Project Page, Dataset
Chengkai Xu, Yiming Cui, Jiaqi Liu, Yicheng Guo, Cheng Qin, Geyuan Zhang, Xinwei Dong, Shiyu Fang, Peng Hang, Jian Sun, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS). Project Page
TeLL-Drive: Enhancing Autonomous Driving with Teacher LLM-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning
Chengkai Xu, Jiaqi Liu, Shiyu Fang, Yiming Cui, Dong Chen, Peng Hang⋆, Jian Sun, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS).
Chengkai Xu, Zihao Deng, Jiaqi Liu⋆, Aijing Kong, Yu Tang, Chao Huang, Peng Hang⋆, accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (TVT).
Chengkai Xu, Jiaqi Liu, Yicheng Guo, Yuhang Zhang, Peng Hang⋆, Jian Sun, accepted by IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC).
- Language-driven policy distillation for cooperative driving in multi-agent reinforcement learning, Jiaqi Liu, Chengkai Xu, Peng Hang, Jian Sun, Mingyu Ding, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).
- Interact, Instruct to Improve: A LLM-Driven Parallel Actor-Reasoner Framework for Enhancing Autonomous Vehicle Interactions, Shiyu Fang, Jiaqi Liu, Chengkai Xu, Chen Lv, Peng Hang, Jian Sun, accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS).
- Recognize then Resolve: A Hybrid Framework for Understanding Interaction and Cooperative Conflict Resolution in Mixed Traffic, Shiyu Fang, Donghao Zhou, Yiming Cui, ChengKai Xu, Peng Hang, Jian Sun, accepted by IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV).
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2025.07 Shanghai Outstanding Graduate (top 1%) with an Excellent Graduation Thesis
- 2025.05 Tongji University Pursuit of Excellence Award (6/18000+)
- 2024.12 Academic Star of Tongji University
- 2024.11 Jingchuan Scholarship
- 2024.05 First Prize in China Transportation Science and Technology Competition
- 2022.12 Outstanding Student Leader of Tongji University
- 2022-2025 Tang Zhongying Moral Education Scholarship
- 2021-2024 Outstanding Student Award at Tongji University
📖 Educations
- 2025.09 - now, Master of Traffic Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
- 2021.09 - 2025.06, Bachelor of Traffic Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China (Rank: 1/230)