Tian Yu Liu

I currently work on the Perception team at Waymo. I completed my PhD in 2025 at UCLA Vision Lab advised by Prof. Stefano Soatto. My research interests can be broadly categorized under representation learning, studying how representations (meanings) can be defined, visualized, and composed in deep learning models. I also obtained my Bachelor of Science (Summa Cum Laude) from UCLA in 2022, with a major in Computer Science and minor in Mathematics, where I had the opportunity to work with Prof. Baharan Mirzasoleiman on data-efficient ML and Prof. Alex Wong on 3D computer vision.

Google Scholar  /  Github  /  LinkedIn  /  tianyu (at) cs (dot) ucla (dot) edu

Website last updated: 2025

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Selected Publications (see full list here)
PICASO: Permutation-Invariant Context Composition with State Space Models
Tian Yu Liu, Alessandro Achille, Matthew Trager, Aditya Golatkar, Luca Zancato, Stefano Soatto
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
[Paper]
Conjuring Semantic Similarity
Tian Yu Liu and Stefano Soatto
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) Workshop on Representation Alignment, 2025
[Paper]
Meanings and Feelings of Large Language Models: Observability of Latent States in Generative AI
Tian Yu Liu, Stefano Soatto, Matteo Marchi, Pratik Chaudhari, Paulo Tabuada
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) Workshop on Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment, 2025
[Paper]
Interpretable Measures of Conceptual Similarity by Complexity-Constrained Descriptive Auto-Encoding
Alessandro Achille, Greg Ver Steeg, Tian Yu Liu, Matthew Trager, Carson Klingenberg, Stefano Soatto
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.
[Paper]
Meaning Representations from Trajectories in Autoregressive Models
Tian Yu Liu, Matthew Trager, Alessandro Achille, Pramuditha Perera, Luca Zancato, Stefano Soatto.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024
[Paper][Code]
Tangent Transformers for Composition, Privacy and Removal
Tian Yu Liu, Aditya Golatkar, Stefano Soatto
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024
[Paper][Code]
Tangent Model Composition for Ensembling and Continual Fine-tuning
Tian Yu Liu and Stefano Soatto
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023.
[Paper] [Code] [Video]
Friendly Noise against Adversarial Noise: A Powerful Defense against Data Poisoning Attacks
Tian Yu Liu, Yu Yang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.
[Paper] [Code]
Data-Efficient Augmentation for Training Neural Networks
Tian Yu Liu and Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.
[Paper] [Code]
Monitored Distillation for Positive Congruent Depth Completion
Tian Yu Liu, Parth Agrawal, Allison Chen, Byung-Woo Hong, Alex Wong
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022.
[Paper] [Code]

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