Litian Gong

Litian Gong

Master's Student in EE

University of California, Riverside

Research Interests

Scalable Robot Learning Frameworks
Imitation and Reinforcement Learning
Visual-Language Models for Decision Making
Sim-to-Real Transfer
Embodied AI

About

Hi there! I am Litian Gong (龚利天), a Master's student in Electrical Engineering at University of California - Riverside. I am currently a member of TASL under the supervision of Prof. Jiachen Li. I am also a student research intern at the Learning and Interactive Robot Autonomy Lab at USC, working with Prof. Erdem Bıyık. Before that, I obtained my bachelor's degree at Huazhong University of Science and Technology under the supervision of Prof. Shaorong Wang.

My research interest lies in robotic learning systems that fuse imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and VLMs to enable multimodal reasoning, long-horizon skills, sim-to-real transfer, and trustworthy, data-efficient autonomy.

Selected Publications

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AutoFocus-IL: VLM-based Saliency Maps for Data-Efficient Visual Imitation Learning without Extra Human Annotations

AutoFocus-IL: VLM-based Saliency Maps for Data-Efficient Visual Imitation Learning without Extra Human Annotations

Litian Gong, Fatemeh Bahrani, Yutai Zhou, Amin Banayeeanzade, Jiachen Li, Erdem Bıyık

arXiv 2025
ORIC: Benchmarking Object Recognition under Contextual Incongruity in Large Vision-Language Models

ORIC: Benchmarking Object Recognition under Contextual Incongruity in Large Vision-Language Models

Zhaoyang Li*, Zhan Ling*, Yuchen Zhou, Litian Gong, Erdem Bıyık, Hao Su

arXiv 2025

News

2024-11

Started research at Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Lab, UC Riverside, working with Prof. Jiachen Li

2024-09

Started Master's program in Electrical Engineering at UC Riverside

2024-06

Graduated from HUST as Outstanding Undergraduate Graduate

Awards

Outstanding Undergraduate Graduate

2024

Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Recognized for outstanding academic performance and research contributions.

Honorable Prize

2023

Mathematical Contest In Modeling

Achieved honorable mention in the international mathematical modeling competition.

Second Prize

2022

China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling

Won second prize in the national mathematical modeling competition.

Services

Conference Reviewer

2025 - present

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Reviewing papers for ICRA, focusing on robot learning, imitation learning, and embodied AI.

Conference Reviewer

2025 - present

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Reviewing papers for CVPR, focusing on vision-language models and computer vision applications in robotics.