Welcome!

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of CIS at the University of Pennsylvania. I also work part-time as a Staff Research Scientist at Apple (MLR) and was a full-time researcher since 2022. Prior to joining Apple, I was a Research Scientist at Meta AI (FAIR Labs).

I obtained my Ph.D. degree at the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Hong Kong in 2018 and I was supervised by Prof. Victor O.K. Li. My doctoral work explored efficient neural machine translation systems. I also spent a wonderful time visiting the CILVR Lab, New York University working with Prof. Kyunghyun Cho. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor’s degree at the Electronic Engineering Department, Tsinghua University in 2014.

Prospective Students

I will be recruiting self-motivated PhD students, visiting students and research interns for this graduate application cycle. I encourage to use this form.

Research Interests

My research goal is to advance the capabilities of AI agents to interact with the physical world, with a special emphasis on leveraging generative machine learning approaches for world modeling, iterative reasoning, and effective decision-making. I am particularly interested in developing multi-modal generative models that span natural language, images, videos, and 3D, ensuring these models are Efficient, Flexible, Scalable, and Knowledgeable. By bridging foundational machine learning research with real-world applications, my research seeks to create robust AI systems capable of operating seamlessly in complex and dynamic environments.