I am Yao Rong,
a postdoctoral fellow in Computer Science
at Rice University.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University in the Computer Science Department, working closely with Dr. Vaibhav Unhelkar. I earned my Ph.D. (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in 2024. Following my graduation, I was honored to be selected as a 2025 EECS Rising Star at MIT and a Future Faculty Fellow at Rice University's School of Engineering and Computing.

My research focuses on building actionable model explanations that help users understand model behavior, identify problems, and determine how to improve the AI system. This vision is structured around designing explanations aligned with human cognition to enhance understanding and verification of model behavior; operationalizing explanations to support tasks such as auditing model weaknesses at scale; and leveraging human feedback to drive model improvement. Building on this foundation, I extend these principles to Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable effective human-AI collaboration in educational and healthcare applications.

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