Ruiqi Wang
Hello!
I'm a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, where I work in the Smart Machine And Robotics Technology (SMART) Lab with Professor B.C. Min.
My research goal is to enable robots to integrate seamlessly into unstructured, human-centered environments.
To this end, I develop methods for robot learning from human feedback, enabling robots to acquire scalable, aligned, and personalized behaviors without hand-specified objectives. I pursue this goal along three directions:
Eliciting Informative Feedback
How can robots obtain informative feedback with minimal human effort?
My research uses foundation models as informative feedback priors to reduce human burden, while developing active, context-aware elicitation that decides when, what, and how to ask.
Learning Intent-Aligned Reward Representations
How can robots convert imperfect, multimodal feedback into reward representations that faithfully capture human intent?
My research develops reward learning methods that distill subtle, noisy, and multimodal feedback into structured representations of human intent, improving credit assignment and robustness to ambiguous, sparse, or conflicting supervision.
Sustaining Generalizable Alignment
How can robots remain aligned as tasks, users, and environments change?
My research develops transferable alignment mechanisms that generalize learned intent across tasks, users, and environments while preserving stable alignment, maintaining task performance, and avoiding drift from human intent.
Beyond learning from feedback, my research also studies how robots can respond to broader human signals in real time, including physiological state, cognitive workload, trust, and interaction dynamics, to sustain fluent, safe, and effective collaboration, especially in human-robot teaming.
Research Areas:
News
- Sep 18 PRIMT accepted as Oral (Top 0.35%) at NeurIPS 2025!
- Jun 15 Two papers accepted at IROS 2025!
- Feb 10 Paper on Multimodal Audio-based Disease Prediction accepted at IEEE/ACM T-ASLP!
- Jan 27 Three papers (including one RA-L transfer) accepted at ICRA 2025!
- Jan 06 PrefCLM accepted at IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters!
- Dec 16 Arjun (mentored undergrad) won First Place at Purdue Fall Undergraduate Research Expo!
- Dec 13 Passed my Ph.D. dissertation proposal defense! 🎉
- Nov 26 Cognitive Load-based Affective Workload Allocation accepted at IEEE T-HMS!
- Jul 10 MOCAS Dataset accepted at IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing!
- May 02 Passed my Ph.D. preliminary exam!
- Feb 05 Attention-enhanced Hierarchical RL for Task Assignment accepted at IEEE RA-L!
- Jan 28 SAMARL accepted at ICRA 2024!
- Jan 17 Husformer accepted at IEEE T-CDS! [Code]
- Dec 28 Conducted robotics seminar at West Lafayette Jr./Sr. High School.
- Jun 21 Two papers accepted at IROS 2023: ITA-AtRL and NaviSTAR!
- May 27 Conducted five-day robotics outreach program for K-12 students.
- Dec 18 Held outreach event at Macau Anglican College.
- Jun 30 Feedback-efficient Active Preference Learning accepted at IROS 2022!