Huaxiu Yao

Huaxiu Yao is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, holding a joint appointment in the School of Data Science and Society and the Department of Computer Science (College of Arts & Sciences). His research focuses on building reliable large-scale AI models (foundation models) with applications in healthcare, robotics, genomics, and transportation. He leads the AIMING Lab, which explores adaptive intelligence through alignment, interaction, and learning.

Education: Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University (2021), Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University (hosted by Chelsea Finn).

Research Interests: Generalizable AI agents, preference alignment, out-of-distribution generalization, embodied AI, and multimodal reasoning. Key applications include biomedicine, robotics, and vision-language systems.

Notable Awards: KDD Best Paper Award (2024), Amazon Research Awards (2025), TMLR Outstanding Paper Award (2024).

Advising & Labs: Recruits Ph.D. and intern students. Leads the AIMING Lab, affiliated with UNC NLP Group. Organizes workshops on foundation models (ICML 2024) and trustworthy AI systems.

Publications: Over 40 peer-reviewed papers, including top venues like ICLR, NeurIPS, and ICML. Focuses on AI alignment, multimodal systems, and domain generalization.