Dechen Gao

Welcome! I am Dechen Gao, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. I received my Master of Science in Computer Science from UC Davis in 2023, and later transferred to the CS PhD program with the support of my advisors Dr. Iman Soltani and Dr. Junshan Zhang. I am grateful to work with my advisors, and collaborate with all my labmates at LARA and DARE.

My research focuses on robotic learning, particularly in reinforcement learning, imitation learning, world models, and foundation models. I am always open to discussions adn collaborations on these topics - feel free to drop me an email if you are interested!

I interned at Meta (2022) and TikTok (2024) and will be joining Amazon as an Applied Scientist Intern in 2025.

News

Sep 01, 2024	Are robots able to actively locate perspectives to solve tasks just like human do? Check out our ICRA work AV-ALOHA that applies active vision for bimanual manipulation!
May 01, 2024	We open-sourced CarDreamer , the first world model based learning platform for autonomous driving!

Experience

2024.06 - 2024.09 San Jose, CA

TikTok - Machine Learning Engineering Intern

Multi-modal understanding and LLMs.
2022.06 - 2022.09 Menlo Park, CA

Meta - Software Engineering Intern

Education

2023.03 - Present Davis, California, US
University of California, Davis - Ph.D. in Computer Science
- Foundation models
- World models
- Reinforcement learning
- Robotics
2021.09 - 2023.06 Davis, California, US
University of California, Davis - Master of Computer Science
2017.09 - 2021.06 Shandong, China
Shandong University - Bachelor of Computer Science

Selected Publications

IEEE IoTJ

Cardreamer: Open-source learning platform for world model based autonomous driving

Dechen Gao , Shuangyu Cai, Hanchu Zhou, Hang Wang, Iman Soltani, and Junshan Zhang

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2024

Bib HTML

@article{gao2024cardreamer,
  title = {Cardreamer: Open-source learning platform for world model based autonomous driving},
  author = {Gao, Dechen and Cai, Shuangyu and Zhou, Hanchu and Wang, Hang and Soltani, Iman and Zhang, Junshan},
  journal = {IEEE Internet of Things Journal},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {IEEE},
}

ICRA

Active vision might be all you need: Exploring active vision in bimanual robotic manipulation

Ian Chuang, Andrew Lee, Dechen Gao , and Iman Soltani

arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17435, 2024

Bib HTML

@article{chuang2024active,
  title = {Active vision might be all you need: Exploring active vision in bimanual robotic manipulation},
  author = {Chuang, Ian and Lee, Andrew and Gao, Dechen and Soltani, Iman},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17435},
  year = {2024},
}

Preprint

World-Model based Hierarchical Planning with Semantic Communications for Autonomous Driving

Dechen Gao , Hang Wang, Shuangyu Cai, Hanchu Zhou, Nejib Ammar, Shatadal Mishra, Iman Soltani, and Junshan Zhang

2024

IEEE IoTJ

EI-Drive: A Platform for Cooperative Perception with Realistic Communication Models

Hanchu Zhou, Edward Xie, Wei Shao, Dechen Gao , Michelle Dong, and Junshan Zhang

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2025

Bib HTML

@article{zhou2024ei,
  title = {EI-Drive: A Platform for Cooperative Perception with Realistic Communication Models},
  author = {Zhou, Hanchu and Xie, Edward and Shao, Wei and Gao, Dechen and Dong, Michelle and Zhang, Junshan},
  journal = {IEEE Internet of Things Journal},
  year = {2025},
}