Guoyang ZHAO (赵国洋) is currently a Ph.D. student in ROAS (Robotics and Autonomous Systems) at HKUST (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou), under the supervision of Prof. Jun MA at the IADC (Intelligent Autonomous Driving Center).
He received his M.Phil. degree in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from HKUST, where he was advised by Prof. Ming LIU. Prior to that, he obtained his B.Sc. degree in Logistics Engineering from NEAU (Northeast Agricultural University), China.

His research interests lie in robotic perception, computer vision, and deep learning.

🔥 News

• 2026.03: 📣 Released the TS-1M million-scale traffic sign dataset.
• 2025.12: 📌 Released a comprehensive survey on VLA for autonomous driving.
• 2025.12: 📝 One paper accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).
• 2025.10: 🌍 Attended IEEE/RSJ IROS 2025 in Hangzhou, China.
• 2025.06: 📝 Our open-world exploration work was accepted by RSS 2025 FM4RoboPlan Workshop.
• 2025.05: 🏆 Selected as Best Paper Award Finalist at ICRA 2025, held in Atlanta, USA.
• 2025.04: 📝 One paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS).
• 2025.03: 📝 Another paper accepted by TITS, marking two TITS papers this year!
• 2025.02: ✍️ Two first-author papers accepted to ICRA 2025.
• 2024.11: 🌍 Attended and presented at IEEE ROBIO 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand.
• 2024.10: 🏅 Attended and presented at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024 in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and received the Best Paper Award in workshop.
• 2024.09: 🎓 Started my Ph.D. journey at HKUST (GZ), Robotics and Autonomous Systems.
• 2024.07: 📝 Two papers accepted by IEEE ITSC 2024.
• 2024.08: 🎓 Successfully passed M.Phil. thesis defense at HKUST (GZ).
• 2024.05: 🌍 Attended IEEE ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Japan.

📝 Publications

1. TITS 2025 CurbNet: Curb Detection Framework Based on LiDAR Point Cloud Segmentation.

Guoyang Zhao, Fulong Ma, Weiqing Qi, Yuxuan Liu, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS), 2025. JCR Q1, IF: 8.4. [Download] [Github]

2. ICRA 2025 TSCLIP: Robust CLIP Fine-tuning for Worldwide Cross-Regional Traffic Sign Recognition.

🏆 Best Conference Paper Award - Finalist

Guoyang Zhao, Fulong Ma, Weiqing Qi, Chenguang Zhang, Yuxuan Liu, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2025. [Download] [Github]

3. ICRA 2025 FisheyeDepth: A Real Scale Self-Supervised Depth Estimation Model for Fisheye Camera.

Guoyang Zhao, Yuxuan Liu, Weiqing Qi, Fulong Ma, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2025. [Download] [Github]

4. arXiv Traffic Sign Recognition in Autonomous Driving: Dataset, Benchmark, and Field Experiment.

Guoyang Zhao, Weiqing Qi, Kai Zhang, Chenguang Zhang, Zeying Gong, Zhihai Bi, Kai Chen, Benshan Ma, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

arXiv preprint, 2026. [Download] [Website]

5. arXiv Decision-Driven Semantic Object Exploration for Legged Robots via Confidence-Calibrated Perception and Topological Subgoal Selection.

Guoyang Zhao, Yudong Li, Weiqing Qi, Kai Zhang, Bonan Liu, Kai Chen, Haoang Li, Jun Ma.

arXiv preprint, 2026. [Download]

6. ROBIO 2025 Learning-Based Subcategory Ground Segmentation Model for LiDAR Point Cloud.

Guoyang Zhao, Fulong Ma, Weiqing Qi, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), 2024. [Download]

7. COMPAG Real-time Recognition System of Soybean Seed Full-surface Defects Based on Deep Learning.

Guoyang Zhao, Longzhe Quan, Hailong Li, Huaiqu Feng, Songwei Li, Shuhan Zhang, Ruiqi Liu.

Computers and Electronics in Agriculture (COMPAG), 2021. JCR Q1, IF: 8.9. [Download]

8. ICRA 2024 OmniColor: A Global Camera Pose Optimization Approach of LiDAR-360Camera Fusion for Colorizing Point Clouds.

Bonan Liu*, Guoyang Zhao (Co-first), Jianhao Jiao, Guang Cai, Chengyang Li, Handi Yin, Yuyang Wang, Ming Liu, Pan Hui.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2024. [Download] [Github]

9. IROS 2024 Workshop Motion-Coupled Mapping Algorithm for Hybrid Rice Canopy.

🏆 Best Paper Award - First Place

Huaiqu Feng, Guoyang Zhao, Cheng Liu, Yongwei Wang, Jun Wang.

IROS 2024 Workshop on AI and Robotics For Future Farming, 2024. [Download]

10. ITSC 2024 CLRKDNet: Speeding up Lane Detection with Knowledge Distillation.

Weiqing Qi, Guoyang Zhao, Fulong Ma, Linwei Zheng, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2024. [Download]

11. TITS 2025 Monocular 3D lane detection for Autonomous Driving: Recent Achievements, Challenges, and Outlooks.

Fulong Ma, Weiqing Qi, Guoyang Zhao, Linwei Zheng, Sheng Wang, Yuxuan Liu, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS), 2025. JCR Q1, IF: 8.4. [Download]

12. TAI 2023 Test-Time Adaptation for Nighttime Color-Thermal Semantic Segmentation.

Yexin Liu, Weiming Zhang, Guoyang Zhao, Jinjing Zhu, Athanasios V Vasilakos, Lin Wang.

IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI), 2023. [Download]

13. arXiv Vision-language-action models for autonomous driving: Past, present, and future.

Tianshuai Hu, Xiaolu Liu, Song Wang, Yiyao Zhu, Ao Liang, Lingdong Kong, Guoyang Zhao, Zeying Gong, Jun Cen, Zhiyu Huang, Xiaoshuai Hao, Linfeng Li, Hang Song, Xiangtai Li, Jun Ma, Shaojie Shen, Jianke Zhu, Dacheng Tao, Ziwei Liu, Junwei Liang.

arXiv preprint, 2026. [Download] [Website]

14. ICRA 2025 Task-Oriented Pre-Training for Drivable Area Detection.

Fulong Ma, Guoyang Zhao, Weiqing Qi, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2025. [Download]

15. IROS 2024 Every Dataset Counts Scaling up Monocular 3D Object Detection with Joint Datasets Training.

Fulong Ma, Xiaoyang Yan, Guoyang Zhao, Xiaojie Xu, Yuxuan Liu, Jun Ma, Ming Liu.

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024. [Download]

16. ROBIO 2024 CrackSegMamba: A Lightweight Mamba Model for Crack Segmentation.

Weiqing Qi, Fulong Ma, Guoyang Zhao, Ming Liu, Jun Ma.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), 2024. [Download]

🎖 Honors and Awards

Awards

• 2025.03 Best Conference Paper Award Finalist at IEEE ICRA 2025, Atlanta, USA
• 2024.10 Best Paper Award - First Place at Workshop on AI and Robotics for Future Farming, IEEE IROS 2024, Abu Dhabi, UAE
• 2022.03 Third Prize of the 17th “Challenge Cup” National College Students’ Extracurricular Academic Science and Technology Works Competition Top-1% (leader)
• 2021.10 Silver Prize of the 7th China International “Internet+” College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition Top-0.5% (leader)
• 2021.07 Gold Prize of the 7th Heilongjiang Province “Internet+” College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (leader)
• 2021.05 First Prize of the 17th “Challenge Cup” Heilongjiang Province College Students’ Extracurricular Academic Science and Technology Works Competition (leader)
• 2020.10 Second Prize of the 8th China TRIZ Cup College Students’ Innovation Method Competition (leader)
• 2020.08 First Prize of the 13th China College Students’ Computer Design Competition Top-1% (leader)
• 2020.07 Gold Prize of the 6th Heilongjiang Province “Internet+” College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition
• 2020.07 Silver Prize of the 6th Heilongjiang Province “Internet+” College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (leader)
• 2020.04 National Excellent Project of College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program (leader)
• 2019.12 Second Prize of the First National College Students’ Intelligent Mechatronics System Innovation Design Competition

Honors

• 2025.03 Awarded ICRA 2025 Travel Grant, Atlanta, USA
• 2024.09 Awarded Ph.D. Postgraduate Studentship (PGS)
• 2022.09 Awarded M.Phil. Postgraduate Studentship (PGS)
• 2022.06 Honorary title of “Outstanding Graduates” of Northeast Agricultural University
• 2021.09 National Encouragement Scholarship
• 2021.09 Honorary title of “Triple-A student” of Northeast Agricultural University
• 2021.09 Science and Technology Innovation Scholarship of Northeast Agricultural University
• 2020.09 Honorary Title of “Double Innovation Star” of Northeast Agricultural University
• 2020.09 Honorary title of “Triple-A student” of Northeast Agricultural University
• 2020.09 National Encouragement Scholarship
• 2020.09 Science and Technology Innovation Scholarship of Northeast Agricultural University
• 2019.09 Social Work Scholarship of Northeast Agricultural University
• 2019.09 Triple-A student scholarship of Northeast Agricultural University

📖 Education

• 2024.09 - now, Ph.D. in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou.
• 2022.09 - 2024.08, M.Phil. in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou.
• 2018.08 - 2022.07, B.Sc. in Logistics Engineering, Northeast Agricultural University.

💻 Internships

• 2025.03 - 2026.03, Ideation Project at Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks (HKSTP)
• 2024.09 - 2025.09, Bridge Program at Lab of Future Technology, HKUST(GZ)
• 2024.09 - 2024.12, 2024 Fall Accelerator Program of MiraclePlus
• 2023.06 - 2023.07, Sustainability and Design Thinking Certificate Program at HKUST, Hong Kong
• 2019.07 - 2019.08, Training Program for AI Talents in Chinese Universities sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Intel Corporation