UTexas CS

Yaxin Liu, Ph.D.

General Information

I am a Research Scientist working with Peter Stone at Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin. I received my Ph.D in computer Science from Georgia Tech. My advisor is Sven Koenig.

I am looking for jobs. Here is my academic job application package.

Research Interests

My research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence. My research provides foundations for building autonomous agents that are able to act intelligently and provide valuable services to people in a complex environment involving uncertainty while taking into account preference structures of their human users. The related subareas include:

Thesis

Decision-Theoretic Planning Under Risk-Sensitive Planning Objectives

Short Abstract:

Risk attitudes are important for human decision making, especially in scenarios where huge wins or losses are possible, as exemplified by
planetary rover navigation, oilspill response, and business applications. Decision-theoretic planners therefore need to take risk
aspects into account to serve their users better. However, most existing decision-theoretic planners use simplistic planning
objectives that are risk-neutral. The thesis research is the first comprehensive study of how to incorporate risk attitudes into
decision-theoretic planners and solve large-scale planning problems represented as Markov decision process models. [full abstract]

The whole thesis in one pdf file (346 pages including the front matter).

The thesis in parts:

Selected Publications

Journal

  1. Sven Koenig, Maxim Likhachev, Yaxin Liu, and David Furcy. Incremental Heuristic Search in Artificial Intelligence. AI Magazine, 25(2): 99-112, 2004.
  2. Sven Koenig and Yaxin Liu. The Interaction of Representations and Planning Objectives for Decision-Theoretic Planning Tasks. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 14(4): 303-326, 2002. [pdf]
  3. Sven Koenig,Boleslaw Szymanski, and Yaxin Liu. Efficient and Inefficient Ant Coverage Methods. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 31: 41-76, 2001. [pdf]
  4. Yaxin Liu and Etienne E. Kerre. An Overview of Fuzzy Quantifiers, Part I: Interpretations. Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 95: 1-21, 1998. [pdf]
  5. Yaxin Liu and Etienne E. Kerre. An Overview of Fuzzy Quantifiers, Part II: Reasoning and Applications. Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 96: 1-12, 1998. [pdf]

Conference

  1. newShivaram Kalyanakrishnan, Yaxin Liu, and Peter Stone. Half Field Offense in RoboCup Soccer: A Multiagent Reinforcement Learning Case Study. In Gerhard Lakemeyer, Elizabeth Sklar, Domenico Sorenti, and Tomoichi Takahashi, editors, RoboCup-2006: Robot Soccer World Cup X, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 2007. To appear. [pdf]  BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD. Some simulations referenced in the paper.
  2. newYaxin Liu and Peter Stone. Value-Function-Based Transfer for Reinforcement Learning Using Structure Mapping. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 415–20, July 2006. [pdf]
  3. newYaxin Liu and Sven Koenig. Functional Value Iteration for Decision-Theoretic Planning with General Utility Functions. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2006. [pdf]
  4. newYaxin Liu and Sven Koenig. Probabilistic Planning with Nonlinear Utility Functions (short paper). In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling (ICAPS), 2006. [pdf]
  5. Yaxin Liu and Sven Koenig. Existence and Finiteness Conditions for Risk-Sensitive Planning: Results and Conjectures. Accepted to the Twenty-First Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-05), 2005. [pdf]
  6. Yaxin Liu and Sven Koenig. Risk-Sensitive Planning with One-Switch Utility Functions: Value Iteration. Accepted to the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), 2005. [pdf]
  7. Matthew E. Taylor, Peter Stone, and Yaxin Liu. Value Functions for RL-Based Behavior Transfer: A Comparative Study. Accepted to the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), 2005. [pdf]
  8. Peter Stone, Gregory Kuhlmann, Matthew E. Taylor, and Yaxin Liu. Keepaway Soccer: From Machine Learning Testbed to Benchmark. Accepted to the Ninth RoboCup International Symposium (RoboCup-05), 2005. [pdf]
  9. Yaxin Liu, Richard Goodwin, and Sven Koenig. Risk-Averse Auction Agents. Proceedings of the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS-03), Melbourne, Australia, July 14-18, 2003. [pdf]
  10. Yaxin Liu, Sven Koenig, and David Furcy. Speeding Up Calculation of Heuristics in Heuristic Search-Based Planning. Proceedings of the Eighteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-02), pages 484-491, Edmonton, Canada, July 28-August 1, 2002. [pdf]
  11. Sven Koenig andYaxin Liu. Terrain Coverage with Ant Robots: A Simulation Study. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS-01), pages 600-607, Montreal, Canada, May 28-June 1, 2001. [pdf]
  12. Sven Koenig andYaxin Liu. Representations of Decision-Theoretic Planning Tasks. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS-00)}, pages 187-195, Breckenridge, CO, April 15-17, 2000. [pdf]
  13. Sven Koenig andYaxin Liu. Sensor Planning with Non-Linear Utility Functions. Proceedings of the Fifth European Conference on Planning (ECP-99)}, pages 265-277, Durham, UK, September 8-10, 1999. [pdf]

Honors

Experience

10/04 --- now
 Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

Research Scientist III. Researched behavior transfer in reinforcement learning and robotics.
09/97 --- 09/04 College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA.

Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant. Researched planning under uncertainty with realistic planning objectives, such as risk attitudes, multiple objectives, and extended goals. Also researched incremental search and its application in symbolic planning, as well as agent-centered search and empirical evaluations.
05/01 --- 08/01 IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY.

Summer Intern. Researched autonomous trading strategies in an e-marketplace for B2B applications, including automatic generations of quotes and promotions.
05/00 --- 08/00 IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY.

Summer Intern. Researched bidding strategies for risk-sensitive agents, and their integration into supply chain management systems. Built a prototype to demonstrate the ideas.
03/96 --- 09/96 Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Gent University, Belgium.

Visiting Researcher. Researched fuzzy logic and fuzzy quantifiers.


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