Jing Liu

Jing Liu
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  • Biography

    Before joining MERL, Jing was an Illinois Future Faculty fellow at the Computer Science department of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC). Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Coordinated Science Lab of UIUC. His research interests include Trustworthy AI, Distributed Learning and Inference, Robust and Efficient Internet-of-Things (IoT), and green AI.

  • Recent News & Events


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  • Awards

    •  AWARD    MERL Team Wins IROS 2026 Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge
      Date: October 1, 2026
      Awarded to: Kei Suzuki, Jing Liu, Alexander Schperberg, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Ye Wang, Harsh Singh, Chak Lam Shek, Maxwell Asselmeier, and Haodi Hu
      MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jing Liu; Alexander Schperberg; Kei Suzuki; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Control, Machine Learning, Optimization, Robotics, Signal Processing
      Brief
      • MERL's team MEL-Craft won first place in the Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge at IROS 2026, held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The inaugural competition attracted approximately 34 registered teams worldwide.

        The challenge asked teams to develop autonomous robot policies for a Unitree G1 humanoid robot to assemble an IKEA UTTER table from its component parts. The robot had to perform the task autonomously at the competition venue, requiring capabilities including perception, bimanual manipulation, spatial reasoning, planning, and control. Human intervention was penalized, and teams were evaluated based on assembly progress and completion time.

        MERL competed as MEL-Craft and achieved first place in the competition. The result demonstrates progress toward reliable humanoid robots capable of performing complex, contact-rich manipulation tasks in real-world environments, an important direction for physical AI and general-purpose robotic systems.

        The MERL team members were Kei Suzuki, Jing Liu, Alexander Schperberg, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, and Ye Wang, with contributions from MERL interns Harsh Singh, Chak Lam Shek, Maxwell Asselmeier, and Haodi Hu.

        The Humanoid IKEA Assembly Challenge was held as part of IROS 2026, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
    •  
    •  AWARD    MERL Wins Awards at NeurIPS LLM Privacy Challenge
      Date: December 15, 2024
      Awarded to: Jing Liu, Ye Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Tsunato Nakai, Kento Oonishi, Takuya Higashi
      MERL Contacts: Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jing Liu; Ye Wang
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Information Security
      Brief
      • The Mitsubishi Electric Privacy Enhancing Technologies (MEL-PETs) team, consisting of a collaboration of MERL and Mitsubishi Electric researchers, won awards at the NeurIPS 2024 Large Language Model (LLM) Privacy Challenge. In the Blue Team track of the challenge, we won the 3rd Place Award, and in the Red Team track, we won the Special Award for Practical Attack.
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  • Research Highlights

  • MERL Publications

    •  Hu, H., Huang, C.-T., Liu, J., Wang, Y., Suzuki, K., Brand, M., Koike-Akino, T., "ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-148 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Hu2026sep,
      • author = {Hu, Haodi and Huang, Chung-Ta and Liu, Jing and Wang, Ye and Suzuki, Kei and Brand, Matthew and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{ReCoVLA: VLM-Guided Reward Compilation for Failure Recovery in Vision-Language-Action Policies}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-148}
      • }
    •  Singh, H., Suzuki, K., Wang, Y., Liu, J., Cascante-Bonilla, P., Koike-Akino, T., "DYNAMIT: Dynamic Zero-Shot Manipulation via Instruction-Grounded Visual Tracking and Interception in Industrial Conveyor Environments", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-146 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Singh2026sep,
      • author = {Singh, Harsh and Suzuki, Kei and Wang, Ye and Liu, Jing and Cascante-Bonilla, Paola and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{DYNAMIT: Dynamic Zero-Shot Manipulation via Instruction-Grounded Visual Tracking and Interception in Industrial Conveyor Environments}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-146}
      • }
    •  Shek, C.L., Wang, Y., Liu, J., Suzuki, K., Tokekar, P., Koike-Akino, T., "Read the Manual: Grounding Behavior Tree Synthesis for Multi-Machine Factory Operation", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-149 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Shek2026sep,
      • author = {Shek, Chak.Lam and Wang, Ye and Liu, Jing and Suzuki, Kei and Tokekar, Pratap and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{Read the Manual: Grounding Behavior Tree Synthesis for Multi-Machine Factory Operation}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-149}
      • }
    •  Liu, J., Wang, Y., Suzuki, K., Koike-Akino, T., "Test-Time Attention: Can Robots Better Follow Commands?", IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) IARL Workshop, September 2026.
      BibTeX TR2026-142 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Liu2026sep,
      • author = {Liu, Jing and Wang, Ye and Suzuki, Kei and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki},
      • title = {{Test-Time Attention: Can Robots Better Follow Commands?}},
      • booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) IARL Workshop},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2026-142}
      • }
    •  Koike-Akino, T., Blaykhman, V., Wang, Y., Liu, J., Vinokur, G.V., "Vibe Patenting: Evaluating LLM Judges for Professional Patent-Drafting Agents", arXiv, September 2026.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Koike-Akino2026sep,
      • author = {{Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Blaykhman, Vlad and Wang, Ye and Liu, Jing and Vinokur, Gennadiy V.}},
      • title = {{Vibe Patenting: Evaluating LLM Judges for Professional Patent-Drafting Agents}},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2026,
      • month = sep,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13422}
      • }
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  • Other Publications

    •  Aditya Deshmukh, Jing Liu and Venugopal V Veeravalli, "Robust mean estimation in high dimensions: An outlier fraction agnostic and efficient algorithm", 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), 2022, pp. 1115-1120.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{deshmukh2022robust,
      • author = {Deshmukh, Aditya and Liu, Jing and Veeravalli, Venugopal V},
      • title = {Robust mean estimation in high dimensions: An outlier fraction agnostic and efficient algorithm},
      • booktitle = {2022 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)},
      • year = 2022,
      • pages = {1115--1120},
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Jing Liu, Chulin Xie, Oluwasanmi O Koyejo and Bo Li, "CoPur: Certifiably Robust Collaborative Inference via Feature Purification", Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{liu2022copur,
      • author = {Liu, Jing and Xie, Chulin and Koyejo, Oluwasanmi O and Li, Bo},
      • title = {CoPur: Certifiably Robust Collaborative Inference via Feature Purification},
      • booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
      • year = 2022
      • }
    •  Jing Liu, Chulin Xie, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Sanmi Koyejo and Bo Li, "Rvfr: Robust vertical federated learning via feature subspace recovery", NeurIPS Workshop New Frontiers in Federated Learning: Privacy, Fairness, Robustness, Personalization and Data Ownership, 2021.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{liu2021rvfr,
      • author = {Liu, Jing and Xie, Chulin and Kenthapadi, Krishnaram and Koyejo, Sanmi and Li, Bo},
      • title = {Rvfr: Robust vertical federated learning via feature subspace recovery},
      • booktitle = {NeurIPS Workshop New Frontiers in Federated Learning: Privacy, Fairness, Robustness, Personalization and Data Ownership},
      • year = 2021
      • }
    •  Aditya Deshmukh, Jing Liu, Venugopal V Veeravalli and Gunjan Verma, "Information flow optimization in inference networks", ICASSP 2020-2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2020, pp. 8289-8293.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{deshmukh2020information,
      • author = {Deshmukh, Aditya and Liu, Jing and Veeravalli, Venugopal V and Verma, Gunjan},
      • title = {Information flow optimization in inference networks},
      • booktitle = {ICASSP 2020-2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)},
      • year = 2020,
      • pages = {8289--8293},
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Jing Liu and Bhaskar D Rao, "Sparse Bayesian learning for robust PCA: Algorithms and analyses", IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 67, No. 22, pp. 5837-5849, 2019.
      BibTeX
      • @Article{liu2019sparse,
      • author = {Liu, Jing and Rao, Bhaskar D},
      • title = {Sparse Bayesian learning for robust PCA: Algorithms and analyses},
      • journal = {IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing},
      • year = 2019,
      • volume = 67,
      • number = 22,
      • pages = {5837--5849},
      • publisher = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Jing Liu and Bhaskar D Rao, "Robust PCA via ℓ0-ℓ1 Regularization", IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 67, No. 2, pp. 535-549, 2018.
      BibTeX
      • @Article{liu2018robust,
      • author = {Liu, Jing and Rao, Bhaskar D},
      • title = {Robust PCA via $$\backslash$ell \_ $\{$0$\}$ $-$$\backslash$ell \_ $\{$1$\}$ $ Regularization},
      • journal = {IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing},
      • year = 2018,
      • volume = 67,
      • number = 2,
      • pages = {535--549},
      • publisher = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Jing Liu, Pamela C Cosman and Bhaskar D Rao, "Robust Linear Regression via ℓ0 Regularization", IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 698-713, 2017.
      BibTeX
      • @Article{liu2017robust,
      • author = {Liu, Jing and Cosman, Pamela C and Rao, Bhaskar D},
      • title = {Robust Linear Regression via $$\backslash$ell\_0 $ Regularization},
      • journal = {IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing},
      • year = 2017,
      • volume = 66,
      • number = 3,
      • pages = {698--713},
      • publisher = {IEEE}
      • }

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