Like Liu
PhD student
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Nanyang Technological University
Research Interests
- Embodied Intelligence
- UAV Vision-Language Navigation
- UAV 3D Spatial Understanding
- Intelligent Video Understanding
About
I am a first-year PhD student at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, jointly affiliated with the AI-for-X Centre, Interdisciplinary Graduate Programme (IGP) and the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE). I am currently working with Prof. Addision Lin Wang at EmPACT Lab.
Before studying at NTU,I received my B. Eng. degree from Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), where I worked with Prof. Dian Shao and Prof. Liang He. Previously, I have enriched my research experience as an intern at QingCloud.
My research focuses on embodied AI, Vision-Language Navigation, and spatial reasoning. I am passionate about applying AI algorithms to unmanned vehicles and exploring cognitive intelligence in embodied AI systems.
If you’re interested in my work or would like to discuss potential cooperation, please feel free to email me—I look forward to connecting and will respond promptly!
Selected Publications
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Vision-And-Language Navigation for Unmanned Systems: Progress and Perspectives
Dian Shao†, Like Liu, Zhengzheng Xu, Junqiang Bai
Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Unmanned Systems (ICAUS 2025)
This survey traces the evolution of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) from indoor to outdoor/aerial settings, emphasizing how foundation models (VLMs/LLMs) enable zero-shot, language-guided autonomy through open-vocabulary perception and reasoning, while reviewing benchmarks, methods, challenges, and future directions for intelligent embodied agents.
Knowing the Self, Understanding the World: A Dual-Cognition Benchmark for UAV Spatio-temporal Reasoning with MLLMs
Like Liu, Zhengzheng Xu, Haitao He, Hongzhe Li, Shuchang Zhang, Dian Shao†
arXiv 2026
We introduce UAV-DualCog, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal LLMs on aerial dual-cognition tasks (reasoning about both UAV self-state and environment state in multiview spatio-temporal contexts) and show that current lightweight MLLMs struggle significantly, especially with self-state understanding.
FineCog-Nav: Integrating Fine-grained Cognitive Modules for Zero-shot Multimodal UAV Navigation
Dian Shao†, Zhengzheng Xu, Peiyang Wang, Like Liu, Yule Wang, Jieqi Shi, Jing Huo
Findings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026 (CVPR 2026 Findings)
We propose FineCog-Nav, a cognitive-inspired, modular zero-shot framework for UAV vision-language navigation, where specialized moderate-sized models handle distinct reasoning functions; evaluated on our new fine-grained benchmark AerialVLN-Fine, it outperforms existing baselines in instruction following, long-horizon planning, and generalization.
FineTec: Fine-Grained Action Recognition under Temporal Corruption via Skeleton Decomposition and Sequence Completion
Dian Shao†, Mingfei Shi, Like Liu
Proceedings of the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
We propose FineTec, a robust framework for fine-grained action recognition from temporally corrupted skeleton sequences, which combines context-aware skeleton completion, semantic spatial decomposition, physics-driven acceleration estimation, and GCN-based fusion—achieving state-of-the-art performance on both coarse- and fine-grained benchmarks under severe data corruption.
Intelligent UAVs Empowered by Large Models: Progress, Applications and Perspectives
Dian Shao†, Chu Tang, Min Chang, Like Liu, Yule Wang, Hao Li, Junqiang Bai
Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica
This survey explores how Large Foundation Models (LFMs) are transforming UAV intelligence—covering architectures, core function enhancements (perception to interaction), high-level cognitive capabilities (reasoning, memory, etc.), applications in key decision-making tasks, and challenges in safety, deployment, and future directions toward efficient, cognition-aware, and collaborative aerial systems.
News
Started PhD research journey at EmPACT Lab, Nanyang Technological University 🎓
One paper has been submitted to ACM MM 2026 Dataset Track 📑
Started new research project on Aerial Spatial Reasoning
One paper has been accepted by Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica 📑
One paper has been accepted by CVPR 2026 Findings 📑
One paper has been accepted by AAAI 2026 📑
One paper has been accepted by ICAUS 2025 📑
Started new research project on Zero-shot UAV Vision-and-Language Navigation
Started new research project on Fine-grained Action Recognition
Attended COP29 as NPU Student Representative in Baku, Azerbaijan 🌍
Won Second Prize in Challenge Cup 2024 🏆
Completed internship at QingCloud Technology as AI Development Engineer
Started undergraduate research journey at Northwestern Polytechnical University 🎓