Hi! I am Yao, nice to meet you!

I am currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Leibniz University Hannover. I am also affiliated with L3S Research Center and CAIMed Research Cluster. I earned my Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 2024. Prior to joining Leibniz University Hannover, I was a Junior Fellow at Rice University.

My research focuses on Trustworthy AI by building actionable XAI (Explainable AI) that helps users understand model behavior, identify problems, and determine how to improve the AI system. My current research focuses on Large Language Models, with an emphasis on safety alignment throughout training and inference, as well as interpretability. I ground this trustworthy AI research in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, where reliability and transparency are essential.

News

    September 2026: Our paper on auditing ML models accepted at NeurIPS 2026 as an oral (top 0.4%)! 🎉
    June 2026: Our paper on explanation algorithm design for robot behaviors accepted at IROS 2026!
    April 2026: Join Leibniz University Hannover as an assistant professor of Computer Science. Looking forward to building my research group here!
    October 2025: Our paper on LLMs in Math Tutoring accepted by IEEE TLT.
    September 2025: Excited to be selected for the MIT EECS Rising Stars Workshop this year! 🌟
    July 2025: Excited to be selected as a Future Faculty Fellow at Rice University’s School of Engineering and Computing!
    April 2025: Participate in the 2025 AAAI Spring Symposium on Varieties of Human-AI Collaboration in San Francisco.
    March 2025: Join the 2025 German-American Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.
    Sept 2024: Move to Houston and start my postdoctoral research at Rice University 🚀.
    July 2024: Our paper accepted to TKDD.
    July 2024: I defend my PhD thesis!
    May 2024: Our paper accepted to ACL Findings.
    April 2024: I am pleased to be helping organize a session at the German-American Frontiers of Engineering Symposium 2025.
    December 2023: One paper accepted to AAAI.
    November 2023: One paper accepted to TPAMI.
    October 2023: I received TUM Seed Fund to coordinate the EU Horizon project proposal.
    August 2023: I serve as a Diversity and Accessibility Chair at ETRA 2024 in Glasgow (ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications).
    May 2023: One paper accepted to UAI 2023.
    April 2023: I move to Munich and continue my Ph.D. at TU Munich in the group Human-Centered Technologies for Learning.
    March 2023: One paper accepted to End-to-End Autonomous Driving @ CVPR 2023.
    September 2022: I join DATA Lab led by Dr. Xia "Ben" Hu as a visiting scholar at Rice University, Houston.
    August 2022: I serve as a Diversity and Inclusion Chair at ETRA 2023 in Tübingen.

Personal Note

🌏 Beyond research, I love embracing life through sports, swimming and tennis (still learning!), and exploring new experiences. I speak three languages: English, German, and Mandarin (my mother tongue), and find that each language opens a window into a new culture. Even if LLMs may one day serve as our universal translators, the joy of discovering a culture through its language is something I would never trade away.