Hi, welcome to my personal website! I am a D.Phil. student in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, where I am a member of the GOALS group at the Oxford Robotics Institute, supervised by Prof. Nick Hawes. Before Oxford, I completed my M.Phil. in Robotics and Autonomous Systems at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) under the supervision of Prof. Jun MA, and conducted my master’s thesis research at the Sycamore Lab, EPFL, with Prof. Maryam Kamgarpour, supported by the NCCR Automation Fellowship. I received my B.Eng. in Electronics and Information Engineering from the Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen).

Research Interests

My D.Phil. research studies cooperation and coordination in multi-agent systems, with a focus on ad hoc teamwork: the problem of designing an autonomous agent that can collaborate effectively with previously unseen teammates, such as agents developed by other organisations or human partners, without any prior coordination, shared conventions, or joint training. Achieving this requires an agent to rapidly infer the capabilities and intentions of its teammates from limited interaction and to adapt its own behaviour accordingly. My current interests include:

• Ad hoc teamwork and coordination with unseen teammates
• Multi-agent reinforcement learning, including safe MARL under chance constraints
• Game-theoretic modelling of strategic interaction among agents
• Graph neural networks for multi-agent systems
• Interaction-aware prediction and decision-making for autonomous driving (previous work)

Previously, my work centred on decision-making for autonomous vehicles in dense, interactive traffic, combining game-theoretic driver modelling, trajectory and intention prediction, and deep reinforcement learning.

Contact

I am always happy to discuss research and potential collaborations on multi-agent systems and sequential decision-making. Please feel free to contact me via email: zhou.xiao.hit@gmail.com (or xiao.zhou@eng.ox.ac.uk).

News

• [06/2026] 🎉🎉 Our paper “SocialTraj: Two-Stage Socially-Aware Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving via Conditional Diffusion Model” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology!
• [06/2026] 🎉🎉 Our paper “Behavioral Uncertainty-Aware Attention Allocation via VLMs for Interactive Autonomous Driving” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology!
• [10/2025] 🎓 I started my D.Phil. at the Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford, supervised by Prof. Nick Hawes.
• [03/2025] I joined the Sycamore Lab at EPFL to conduct my master’s thesis research with Prof. Maryam Kamgarpour.
• [12/2024] 🎉🎉 I received the NCCR Automation Fellowship 2025!
• [09/2024] 🎉🎉 Our paper “Game-Theoretic Driver Modeling and Decision-Making for Autonomous Driving with Temporal-Spatial Attention-Based Deep Q-Learning” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles!