Sangjae Bae, Ph.D.

I am a Lead Scientist at Honda Research Institute, USA, where I develop intelligent decision-making systems for autonomous vehicles. Prior to joining HRI, I received the Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering at UC Berkeley, advised by Prof. Scott Moura, and B.S. in Electronics Engineering at Kyung Hee University, South Korea.

Honda Research Institute USA is looking for highly motivated research interns for Summer 2026. If interested, please refer to our careers page.

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Research

How can autonomous vehicles make safe, cooperative decisions in complex, unpredictable environments?

My work sits at the intersection of control, optimization, and machine learning, with a focus on building decision-making systems that are safe, efficient, and capable of reasoning about the behavior of others. I am particularly interested in problems where classical model-based approaches and modern data-driven methods — such as reinforcement learning, neural networks, and vision-language models — can complement each other.

Selected Publications

J. Jahncke, B. Zarrouki, M. Piccinini, J. D'sa, D. Isele, S. Bae, J. Betz, "Differentiable Weights-Varying Nonlinear MPC via Gradient-Based Policy Learning: An Autonomous Vehicle Guidance Example", IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2026. [paper] [project]

A. Li, S. Bae, D. Isele, R. Beeson, F. M. Tariq, "End-to-End Predictive Planner for Autonomous Driving with Consistency Models", ITSC, 2025. [paper] [project] [code]

H. Kang, E. Sachdeva, P. Gupta, S. Bae, K. Lee, "GFlowVLM: Enhancing Multi-step Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Generative Flow Networks", CVPR, 2025. [paper] [project]

P. Gupta, D. Isele, E. Sachdeva, P.-H. Huang, B. Dariush, K. Lee, S. Bae, "Generalized Mission Planning for Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Teams via LLM-Constructed Hierarchical Trees", ICRA, 2025. [paper]

H. Hu, D. Isele, S. Bae, J. F. Fisac, "Active Uncertainty Reduction for Safe and Efficient Interaction Planning: A Shielding-Aware Dual Control Approach", IJRR, 2024. [paper] [project] [code]

S. Bae, D. Isele, A. Nakhaei, P. Xu, A. M. Anon, C. Choi, K. Fujimura, S. Moura, "Lane-Change in Dense Traffic with Model Predictive Control and Neural Networks", IEEE TCST, 2022.