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Derek Ming Siang TAN

Ph.D. Candidate
National University of Singapore
derektan@u.nus.edu


About Me

I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the National University of Singapore (NUS), specializing in VLA/VLNs and RL for robotic systems. Really fortunate to be part of Multi-Agent Robotic Motion (MARMot) Lab, under the supervision of Prof. Guillaume Sartoretti and Prof. Marcelo Ang. I was also a visiting researcher at the Robot Vision and Learning (RVL) Lab in the University of Toronto (UofT) under Prof. Florian Shkurti, researching on multimodal foundation models.

I am also working part-time in Singapore Technologies Engineering, having led many initiatives on developing the autonomy for all sorts of robots (UGVs, UAVs, quadrupeds etc.), and more recently, as an AI systems engineer designing a generic interface to connect our products to latest Embodied AI tech. Happy to chat more about anything related to AI or robotics!

I am currently looking for highly-motivated and experienced interns. If you are keen in my area of research, feel free to reach out with your CV.

Research Interests

News

Publications

  1. RL²-VLA: Adaptive RL Latent Compositional Steering with Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language-Action Models
    Derek M. S. Tan, Shailesh, Srikrishna Iyer and William W. J. Teo and Yuanliang Ju and Qiao Gu and Guillaume Sartoretti
    Under Review, 2026.
    Project Page PDF Code Video

  2. Search-TTA: A Multimodal Test-Time Adaptation Framework for Visual Search in the Wild
    Derek M. S. Tan, Shailesh, Boyang Liu, Alok Raj, Qi Xuan Ang, Weiheng Dai, Tanishq Duhan, Jimmy Chiun, Yuhong Cao, Florian Shkurti, Guillaume Sartoretti
    Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025.
    Project Page PDF Code Video Demo Spotlight

  3. ORION: Option-Regularized Deep Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Multi-Agent Online Navigation
    Shizhe Zhang, Jingsong Liang, Zhitao Zhou, Shuhan Ye, Yizhuo Wang, Derek M. S. Tan, Jimmy Chiun, Yuhong Cao, Guillaume Sartoretti
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026
    PDF Code Oral Presentation

  4. AID: Agent Intent from Diffusion for Multi-Agent Informative Path Planning
    Jeric Lew, Yuhong Cao, Derek M. S. Tan, Guillaume Sartoretti
    International Conference on Swarm Intelligence, 2025
    PDF Code Oral Presentation

  5. IR²: Implicit Rendezvous for Robotic Exploration Teams under Sparse Intermittent Connectivity
    Derek M. S. Tan, Yixiao Ma, Jingsong Liang, Yi Cheng Chng, Yuhong Cao, Guillaume Sartoretti
    IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024.
    Project Page PDF Code Video Oral Presentation

  6. Context Mask Priors via Vision-Language Model for Ergodic Search
    Derek M. S. Tan, Ananya Rao, Abigail Breitfeld, Guillaume Sartoretti
    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.
    PDF Workshop Poster

  7. Privileged Reinforcement Learning for Distributed, Bandwidth-limited Multi-Robot Exploration
    Yixiao Ma, Jingsong Liang, Yuhong Cao, Derek M. S. Tan, Guillaume Sartoretti
    International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS), 2024.
    PDF Code Oral Presentation

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