Anthony Liang

Ph.D. Student, University of Southern California

Anthony Liang's profile picture

I am a final year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California coadvised by Erdem Bıyık (LiRA Lab) and Stephen Tu. I am interested in efficient robot learning from various forms of natural human feedback, such as gaze, hand demonstrations, videos, and preferences. I am also interested in reinforcement learning for efficient adaptation of agents to new tasks and environments. I had the pleasure to intern at Google Gemini to work on post-training RL for reasoning models and with Google Research working on meta-RL on dynamic long-horizon MDPs. I also interned at Meta Reality Lab building task-oriented dialogue systems using LLMs.

Prior to joining USC, I spent a summer (during the pandemic) as a visiting scholar at CMU working with Changliu Liu. I graduated from the University of Michigan with a Masters in Robotics and Bachelors in Computer Science where I worked with Wilka Carvalho and Honglak Lee. I had the pleasure to intern at Amazon, Invisible.ai, Google Ads, Luminar and Socratic.

Feel free to say hi: anthony dot liang at usc dot edu

Research Statement | CV

News

Mar 2026 We released Robometer, a reward model that works zero-shot for any robot, task, and scene — check it out!
Mar 2026 HAND Me the Data accepted to ICRA 2026 — see you in Vienna!
June 2025 Co-organizing the RSS 2025 Workshop on Human-in-the-Loop Robot Learning.
May 2025 Starting Research Intern with the Google Gemini team in New York!
Sept 2024 DynaMITE-RL accepted to NeurIPS 2024 as a poster.
June 2024 PromptDTLA accepted to ICML 2024 ICL Workshop and DynaMITE-RL accepted to AutoRL Workshop
June 2024 ViSaRL accepted to International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)
May 2023 Student Researcher at Google with the Machine Intelligence group
May 2022 Started at Meta Reality Lab as an NLP Research Intern working on Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems using LLMs
Sept 2021 Started my Ph.D. at USC with the GLAMOR group!
May 2021 Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon
Oct 2020 Preprint out on arXiv: Reinforcement Learning for Sparse-Reward Object-Interaction Tasks

Publications

Preprints

🍌 Plantain: Plan-Answer Interleaved Reasoning

Anthony Liang, Jonathan Berant, Adam Fisch, Abhimanyu Goyal, Kalpesh Krishna†, Jacob Eisenstein†

Work done during Google internship

CLAM paper thumbnail

🐚 CLAM: Continuous Latent Action Models for Robot Learning from Unlabeled Demonstrations

Anthony Liang*, Pavel Czempin*, Matthew Hong, Yutai Zhou, Erdem Bıyık, Stephen Tu

Conference Papers

Robometer paper thumbnail

RobometerRobometer: Scaling General-Purpose Robotic Reward Models via Trajectory Comparisons

Anthony Liang*, Yigit Korkmaz*, Jiahui Zhang, Minyoung Hwang, Abrar Anwar, Sidhant Kaushik, Aditya Shah, Alex S. Huang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dieter Fox, Yu Xiang, Anqi Li, Andreea Bobu, Abhishek Gupta, Stephen Tu†, Erdem Bıyık†, Jesse Zhang†

hand emojiHAND Me the Data: Fast Robot Adaptation via Hand Path Retrieval

Matthew Hong*, Anthony Liang*, Kevin Kim, Harshitha Rajaprakash,
Jesse Thomason†, Erdem Bıyık†, Jesse Zhang†

dynamite-rl

🧨 DynaMITE-RL: A Dynamic Model for Improved Temporal Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Anthony Liang, Guy Tennenholtz, Chih-wei Hsu, Yinlam Chow, Erdem Bıyık, Craig Boutilier

Work done during Google internship

visarl

ViSaRL: Visual Reinforcement Learning Guided by Human Saliency

Anthony Liang, Jesse Thomason, Erdem Bıyık

load

Reinforcement Learning for Sparse-Reward Object-Interaction Tasks in First-person Simulated 3D Environments

Wilka Carvalho, Anthony Liang, Kimin Lee, Sungryull Sohn, Honglak Lee, Richard L. Lewis, Satinder Singh

Workshop Papers

prompt-dtla

In-Context Generalization to New Tasks From Unlabeled Observation Data

Anthony Liang, Pavel Czempin, Yutai Zhou, Stephen Tu, Erdem Bıyık

transformer_adapters

Transformer Adapters for Robot Learning

Anthony Liang, Ishika Singh, Karl Pertsch, Jesse Thomason


Teaching

CSCI 445: Foundations of Robotics (USC) Spring 2026
CSCI 699: Robot Learning (USC) Fall 2024
CSCI 499: Interactive Natural Language Processing (USC) Fall 2023
EECS 442: Computer Vision (Michigan) Winter 2021
EECS 498: Algorithmic Robotics (Michigan) Winter 2020
EECS 504: Graduate Computer Vision (Michigan) Fall 2020
EECS 280: Introduction to Programming and Data Structures (Michigan) Fall 2018, Winter 2018, Fall 2019


Invited Talks

Scaling Reward Models via Preference Comparisons 2026
Apple Robotics Reading Group (Host: Soheil Habibian)

Miscellaneous

When I'm not in the lab, I'm an aspiring ATP 1000 tennis player, a golf hobbyist, and I love trying new food recipes.


Updated Mar 2026