Ruotong Liao

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student at LMU Munich supervised by Prof. Volker Tresp and co-supervised by Prof. Serena Yeung-Levy at Stanford University. I am an enthusiastic AI researcher in the field of Structured Generative AI, Multimodal Agents, with a special focus on reasoning on temporal data such as videos, dynamic graphs, etc. Prior to my PhD, I finished my Master’s at Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Electrical Engineering. After that, I started my PhD program fully funded by Munich Center of Machine Learning (MCML), the German permanent AI center. I am awarded additional personal funding of 130,000 Euro from the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and German Aerospace Center (DLR) aimed at supporting my research in my role as a future tech lead.

I have several positions for Research Assistants. Please reach out if you are interested in collaborations, master thesis, and research assistants!

Research Interests

• Generative AI: Video Generation, Visual Autoregressive Models
• Multi-modal Foundation Models: Visual-Language Models (VLMs), Multimodal Agents, Agentic Video Understanding
• Structured Data: (Temporal) Knowledge graphs, Dynamic Graphs, Scene graphs, Structured Priors for Embodied Agents

News

• [July. 2026] Invited Talk of “Towards Superhuman Intelligence: Self-evolvement with Online Verified Synthetic Data” at Bay Area Frontier Research Club in Palo Alto. (Youtube).
• [Jun. 2026] Funding award admission to MLSS2026 cohort in Columbia University, New York.
• [Dec. 2025] I became a Visiting Student Researcher (VSR) at Stanford University, co-supervised by Prof. Serena Yeung-Levy at MARVL and Stanford AI Lab (SAIL).
• [Oct. 2025] Happy to be in Honolulu and present our work at ICCV2025 Workshop on Long Multi-Scene Video Foundations Generation, Understanding and Evaluation.
• [Mar. 2025] Invited Talk of Perceive, Remember and Predict: Explainable Multimodal Agents with Symbolic Representations at United Nations AI for Good (YouTube), EML Heimholz, VIVO Europe Research Center.
• [Dec. 2024] Invited Talk of Reasoning with LLMs with a Temporal View at Technical University of Dresden in Dresden.
• [Nov. 2024] I finished the Volkswagen Diversity & Inclusivity training in Wolfsburg.
• [Nov. 2024] I finished the HUAWEI Forsight-driven Innovation training in Munich.
• [Sep. 2024] 🎉One paper is accepted to EMNLP 2024!
• [Jul. 2024] I finished the BOSCH Innovation & Entrepreneurship training in Stuttgart.
• [Jul. 2024] 🎉One paper is accepted to ECCV 2024!
• [Jul. 2024] 🎉Accepted to ELLIS Summer School of Collaborative and Generative AI (CoGenAI) in Helsinki!
• [Jun. 2024] We organized the ELLIS Workshop of Semantic, Symbolic and Interpretable Machine Learning (SSIML@ELLIS) together with ELISE Wrap Up Conference & ELLIS Community Event in Helsinki.
• [Api. 2024] Joint project with Huawei Munich Research Center kicked off.
• [Mar. 2024] 🎉Two papers are accepted to NAACL2024!
• [Feb. 2024] Invited Talk of Foundation Models on Temporal Graphs at Semantic, Symbolic and Interpretable Machine Learning workshop hosted at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics (MFO), Germany.
• [Dec. 2023] Invited Spotlight Talk of Generative Forcasting on Temporal Knowlege Graph at TGL@NeurIPS2023. See you in New Orleans!
• [Jul. 2023] 🎉Awarded with personal funding of 130,000 euro by BMBF and DLR to support my research and aim for future tech lead!
• [May. 2023] 🎉One paper is accepted as Finding of ACL 2023!

Selected Awards

• 2023 Funding Award of 130,000 euro by BMBF(German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) and DLR (German Aerospace Center).
• 2019 Full Scholarship for both Karlsruhe School of Optics & Photonics (KIT) and Abbe School of Photonics (Jena).
• 2018 Outstanding Student Leader as Vice Student President as a Bachelor.
• 2018 National third Prize in the National Photo-electric Design Competition.
• 2017 Funding Award for National College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
• 2016 Scholarship for First Prize of Excellent Students for Undergraduates.

Publications

Fun Facts

• I served as a coach for the National Olympiad in Informatics Programming for three years and was the co-founder of a startup for computer science education.
• I once led an organization committee for a concert for more than 3,000 people.
• I won the Fifth Prize in a video-making competition on Bilibili (Chinese YouTube).

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