Papers
12
Total Citations
267
H-Index
8
About
Karen Leung is a robotics and autonomous systems researcher whose work sits at the intersection of safety-critical planning, formal methods, and human-robot interaction. She is perhaps best known for her pioneering research on integrating reachability-based safety assurance into autonomous driving frameworks, with her 2020 paper on the topic accumulating 93 citations — a testament to its significant influence on the field. By developing methods that account for uncertainty in human driver behavior without compromising safety guarantees, Leung has helped bridge the gap between theoretical safety frameworks and real-world deployment challenges. A particularly notable thread in her research involves Signal Temporal Logic (STL), where she introduced STLCG, a computation graph-based technique enabling backpropagation through logical specifications. This innovation, cited over 80 times across multiple publications, allows gradient-based machine learning methods to directly incorporate structured temporal rules — a powerful tool for robot planning and control. Her work on multimodal probabilistic models further addresses the challenge of predicting multiple plausible human behaviors in interactive scenarios, such as highway merging and crowded pedestrian environments. Across her career, Leung has consistently advanced the principled integration of formal logic, safety theory, and learning-based approaches in autonomous robotics.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 4Backpropagation for Parametric STL19 citations · 2019
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- 8Multimodal Probabilistic Model-Based Planning for Human-Robot Interaction10 citations · 2018
- 9Generative Modeling of Multimodal Multi-Human Behavior7 citations · 2018
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