NVIDIA Autonomous Vehicle Applied Research (AVAR) Team

Welcome to the homepage of NVIDIA's Autonomous Vehicles Applied Research (AVAR) team, led by Jose M. Alvarez. The team focuses on several research areas related to AV and Physical AI. We are particularly interested in:

End-to-End methods for Autonomous Driving and Phyisical AI
Data-centric deep learning
Efficient and scalable systems

We are currently looking for outstanding candidates to join our team as a research interns.

Highlights

July 2026: We will be organizing the "World Models in Physical AI workshop" at NeurIPS 2026

June 2026: 2 Papers accepted to ECCV 2026!

March 2026: 4 Papers accepted to CVPR 2026!

VideoITG: Multimodal Video Understanding with Instructed Temporal Grounding
4D-Surf: High-Fidelity Dynamic Scene Surface Reconstruction
Mitigating Multimodal Hallucinations via Gradient-based Self-Reflection
Scaling-Aware Data Selection for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Systems

Feb 2026: DriveCritic has been accepted to ICRA 2026!

Jan 2026: ChronoEdit has been accepted to ICLR 2026!

November 2025: 1 Paper accepted to AAAI 2026! (acceptance rate: 17.6%, total number of submissions: 23,680)!!!

DriveSuprim: Towards Precise Trajectory Selection for End-to-End Planning,

Oct 2025: Runner-up Award and the Innovation Award at the RealADSim workshop during ICCV 2025

Sept 2025: 1 Paper accepted to NeurIPS 2025!

Sept 2025: 1 Paper accepted to WACV 2026!

GHOST: Getting to the Bottom of Hallucinations with A Multi-round Consistency Benchmark

Sept 2025: Invited talk to Intelligent Safety Conference 2025, Xi'an, China.

July 2025:

Nadine Chang gave a talk at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, as part of the AI Factory initiative: Less is More: Accelerating AI with Advanced Data Strategies

June 2025:

1st Place at the End-to-End Driving challenge at CVPR 2025 with Our Generalized Trajectory Scoring Method
Invited talk to Safe Artifical Intelligence for All Domains (SAAID) workshop at CVPR 2025
Paper accepted to ICCV 2025: Hydra-NeXt: Robust Closed-Loop Driving with Open-Loop Training

May 2025: 1 Paper accepted to IROS 2025!

Enhancing Autonomous Driving Safety with Collision Scenario Integration

March 2025: We are organizing 2 tutorials at CVPR 2025.

Jan 2025: We are organizing three workshops at CVPR 2025:

Workshop on Exploring the Next Generation of Data.
The 8th Edition of Workshop on Autonomous Driving.
The 4th Edition of Transformers for Vision (T4V workshop).

June 2024: 1st Place at the End-to-End Autonomous Driving at Scale Challenge!
June 2024: 2nd Place at the Drive with Language Models Challenge!

April 2024: 1 paper accepted at IEEE-IV 2024.
Feb 2024: 4 papers accepted at CVPR 2024.
Feb 2024: We will host the Workshop on Autonomous Driving at CVPR 2024.
Feb 2024: We will host the GPU-based DL Acceleration tutorial at CVPR 2024.
Jan 2024: 2 papers accepted at ICLR 2024 on efficient and robust large models.

Alumni

Former Team Members

Jonhathan Howe
Jiwoong Choi
Yashar Asgarieh
Barath Laskhmanan

Former Interns

Jingyu Song

Zhenxin Li – MSc, Fudan Univ.
Shihao Wang – MSc, Beijing Institute of Technology
Zi Wang – MSc, Carnegie Mellon Univ. (now NVIDIA)
Sihan Liu – MSc, Fudan Univ.
Shan Wang – PhD, Australian National Univ.
Nikita Durasov – PhD, EPFL (now NVIDIA)
Jenny Schmalfuss – PhD, University of Stuttgart (now NVIDIA)
Chonghao Sima – PhD, Hong Kong Univ.
Jihao Liu – PhD, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Feiyang Kang – PhD, Virginia Tech Univ.
Vibashan VS – PhD, John Hopkins University (now Wayve)

Zhiqi Li – PhD, Nanjing Univ.
Yiming Li – PhD, NYU (now NVIDIA)

David Wang – PhD, Tsinghua Univ.
Shixing Yu – PhD, Univ. Texas Austin
Yanwei Li – PhD, CUHK
Zhiqi Li – PhD, Nanjing Univ.
Zetong Yang – PhD, CUHK
Tzofi Klinghoffer – PhD, MIT
Bingyin Zhao – PhD, Clemson Univ.
Annamarie Bair – PhD, CMU
Yilun Chen – PhD, CUHK
Alex Sun – MS, Stanford. (now NVIDIA)
Justin Hsu – BS, Stanford
Arnav Joshi – BS, Stanford
Shubhranshu Sigh – MS, CMU

Jiayu Yang – PhD, Australian National University
Marc Finzi – PhD, NYU
Enze Xie – PhD, HKU (now NVIDIA)
Ryan Humble – PhD, Stanford
Vlad Sobal – PhD, NYU
Jianna Liu – BS, MIT
Xinlong Wang – PhD, Univ. Adelaide
Daquan Zhou – PhD, NUS
Faith Johnson – PhD, Rutgers
Javier Sagastuy Brena – PhD, Stanford
Joshua Chen – MS, CMU (now Nvidia)
Nithya Attaluri – BS, MIT
Jessica Lee – MS, CMU (now Cerebras)

Jiwoong Choi PhD, Seoul Nat. University (now NVIDIA)
Ismail Elezi PhD TUM (now PostDoc TUM)
Shuxuan Guo - PhD. EPFL
Marvin Kim – MS CMU (now Waymo)
Lilian Luong – BS MIT
Cynthia Liu – MS, MIT (now Cerebras)
Nadine Chang – PhD CMU. (now NVIDIA)
Yerlan Idelbayav – PhD UC Merced (now Amazon)
Xinnan Du – MS CMU (now Goldman Sachs)
Hoang Vu Nguyen – PhD Stony Brooks Univ.

Maying Shen – MS CMU (now Nvidia)
Michael Zhang – BS Hardvard (now PhD Stanford)
Akshay Chawla – MS CMU (now Vicarious)
Kashyap Chitta – MS CMU (now PhD student MPI)
Tony Wang – BS MIT
Wenbo Guo – PhD Penn. State Univ.
Nikhil Murthy – BS MIT

Jiaming Zeng – PhD Stanford (now IBM Research)
Yousef Hindy – MS Stanford (now NewCo)
Kashyap Chitta – MS CMU (now PhD student MPI)