I lead the Tianyi Lab, where we study how machines can learn the way strong learners do in an open world: choosing what to learn and when, cycling between generalists and specialists, and staying aligned with humans and the world. Our current work spans LLM reasoning, unified multimodal models, agents, and human–AI–world alignment, with applications in education, science, design, and digital/embodied agents.
Recent recognition includes the ACL 2026 SAC Highlight Award and the 2026 eAA Best Research Award (more on the CV). I have advised 14 Ph.D. students, including a 2026 Apple Scholar in AI/ML (Ming Li) and a 2025 UMD Flagship Fellow (Dongping Chen); the group page has the full list.
- 20k+ citations
- 65 h-index
- 180+ papers at top venues
- Top 2% scientists worldwide by Stanford
- 14 Ph.D. advised (2 graduated)
Research themes
Human–AI–World alignment
Self-evolving / sustaining AI
Generalist–specialist cycle
Interpretability and foundations
Papers by topic are on the research page; the complete list by year is under publications.
news last 12 months · full archive
| Jul 2026 | 4 papers have been accepted by COLM 2026, 2 papers have been accepted by ECCV 2026. |
|---|---|
| Jul 2026 | Schoenfeld’s Anatomy of Mathematical Reasoning by Language Models has been selected as “SAC Highlight” on ACL 2026. |
| Jun 2026 | Item Difficulty Modeling Using Fine-tuned Small and Large Language Models won 2026 Best Research Award from the International EAssessment Association (eAA). |
| May 2026 | 6 ICML (1 Oral + 1 Spotlight) + 5 ACL (1 Oral) + 5 ICLR + 1 ACM CAIS + 1 EACL + 1 AAAI have been accepted in 2026. |
| Mar 2026 | I will serve as the Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026 and most ARR circles (ACL, EMNLP, etc.). |
| Jan 2026 | I am visiting MBZUAI, UAE as a Visiting Assistant Professor for one year and have experienced the 2026 Middle East Conflict. |
| Jan 2026 | Congratulations to Ming Li on being awarded 2026 Apple Scholar in AI/ML! |
| Nov 2025 | I am going to serve as an Area Chair of ICML 2026. |