Publications

Preprints

In the Driver's Seat: A Multi-Company Study on the Reality of Autonomous Driving System Testing

Qunying Song, Yuan Gao, Johannes Betz, Dietmar Pfahl, Mohammad Reza Mousavi, Federica Sarro

arXiv preprint, 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF)

SGTP: game-theoretic racing planner teaser

SGTP: Sampling-based Game-Theoretic Planning for Real-Time Multi-Vehicle Autonomous Racing

Zhouheng Li, Fangguo Zhao, Mattia Piccinini, Baha Zarrouki, Yuan Gao, Zitong Shan, Johannes Betz, Chen Lv, Lei Xie

arXiv preprint, 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository | Project Homepage

StyleVLA: Driving Style-Aware Vision Language Action Model for Autonomous Driving

Yuan Gao*, Dengyuan Hua, Mattia Piccinini, Finn Rasmus Schäfer, Korbinian Moller, Lin Li, Johannes Betz

arXiv preprint, 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF) | Project Homepage

Journal Papers

OJ-ITS'26

Foundation Models in Autonomous Driving: A Survey on Scenario Generation and Scenario Analysis

Yuan Gao*, Mattia Piccinini, Yuchen Zhang, Dingrui Wang, Korbinian Moller, Roberto Brusnicki, Baha Zarrouki, Alessio Gambi, Jan Frederik Totz, Kai Storms, Steven Peters, Andrea Stocco, Bassam Alrifaee, Marco Pavone, Johannes Betz

IEEE Open Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2026

Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository

H2 Suboptimal Containment Control of Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Systems

Yuan Gao*, Junjie Jiao, Zhongkui Li, Sandra Hirche

IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (Under Review)

arXiv

Conference Papers

ECCV'26

EgoDyn-Bench: Evaluating Ego-Motion Understanding in Vision-Centric Foundation Models for Autonomous Driving

Finn Rasmus Schäfer, Yuan Gao, Dingrui Wang, Thomas Stauner, Stephan Günnemann, Mattia Piccinini, Sebastian Schmidt, Johannes Betz

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository | Project Homepage | Dataset

ECCV'26

Target-Bench: Can Video World Models Achieve Mapless Path Planning with Semantic Targets?

Dingrui Wang, Zhihao Liang, Hongyuan Ye, Zhexiao Sun, Zhaowei Lu, Yuchen Zhang, Yuyu Zhao, Yuan Gao, Marvin Seegert, Finn Schäfer, Haotong Qin, Wei Li, Luigi Palmieri, Felix Jahncke, Mattia Piccinini, Johannes Betz

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository | Project Homepage | Dataset

IROS'26

Chat2Scenic: An Iterative RAG-Based Framework for Scenario Generation in Autonomous Driving

Yuan Gao*, Wenting Miao, Mattia Piccinini, Haoyu Wang, Qunying Song, Johannes Betz

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository | Project Homepage | Dataset

ITSC'26

Can VLMs Unlock Semantic Anomaly Detection framework

Can VLMs Unlock Semantic Anomaly Detection? A Framework for Structured Reasoning

Roberto Brusnicki, David Pop, Yuan Gao, Mattia Piccinini, Johannes Betz

IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository | Project Homepage | Dataset

ICRA'26

NuRisk: A Visual Question Answering Dataset for Agent-Level Risk Assessment in Autonomous Driving

Yuan Gao*, Mattia Piccinini, Roberto Brusnicki, Yuchen Zhang, Johannes Betz

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository | Project Homepage | Dataset

GRC'26

Towards Whole-Body VLA — framework overview

Towards Whole-Body VLA: A Scalable Data Collection Framework for Quadrupedal Mobile Manipulators

Yuan Gao*, Mattia Piccinini, Johannes Betz

2nd German Robotics Conference (GRC), 2026

Full Text (PDF)

ICSE'26-Workshop

Warnless at the DeepTest 2026 Tool Competition

Qunying Song, Yuan Gao, Roberto Brusnicki, Federica Sarro

7th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Deep Learning for Testing (DeepTest), 2026

ACM Digital Library

RSS'26-Workshop

iKCE: same policy, two frictions — walks vs collapses

Imagined Rollouts are Kinematic, Not Dynamic: A Diagnosis of Long-Horizon World-Model Failure

Finn Rasmus Schäfer, Korbinian Moller, Yuan Gao, Christian Oefinger, Sebastian Schmidt, Johannes Betz

RSS Robot World Model Workshop, 2026

arXiv | Full Text (PDF)

ITSC'25

From Words to Collisions: LLM-Guided Evaluation and Adversarial Generation of Safety-Critical Driving Scenarios

Yuan Gao*, Mattia Piccinini, Korbinian Moller, Amr Alanwar, Johannes Betz

IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2025

arXiv | Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository

IFAC-WC'23

H2 Suboptimal Leader-Follower Consensus Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Yuan Gao*, Junjie Jiao, Sandra Hirche

IFAC World Congress, 2023

Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository | Presentation (PDF)

ACC'23

H2 Suboptimal Containment Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Yuan Gao*, Junjie Jiao, Sandra Hirche

American Control Conference (ACC), 2023

Full Text (PDF) | GitHub Repository | Poster (PDF)