“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” — Linus Torvalds

Hello, I'm Xi Xiao.

I am an AI Researcher

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, co-advised by Prof. Tianyang Wang and Prof. Min Xu. I'm also a student researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory working with Dr. Xiao Wang since May 2025.

I am actively seeking Research Internship opportunities in Summer 2027. If your team is hiring researchers in MLLM / Agentic post-training-related areas, or if you know of relevant opportunities, please feel free to reach out. Thank you!

Scholar GitHub LinkedIn WeChat xxiao [at] uab (dot) edu

Experience

08/2026 - Present

Research Scientist Intern @ Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

Working with Dr. Xiao Wang and Dr. Dan Lu. Contributing to the “Genesis Mission” to advance AI4Science discovery through the pre-training and post-training of Foundation Model.

05/2026 - 08/2026

Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon AGI Foundations

Seattle, Washington, USA

Working with Dr. Eric Zhao, Dr. Xiang Xu, and Dr. Youngeun Kim on MLLM / Agentic Reasoning / RL.

05/2025 - 05/2026

Research Scientist Intern @ Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

Working with Dr. Xiao Wang on MLLM post-training and exascale distributed pretraining.

Education

01/2024 - Present

Ph.D. in Computer Science

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Birmingham, Alabama, USA · Expected Spring 2028

09/2019 - 06/2023

Bachelor's Degree in Artificial Intelligence

Sichuan University Jincheng College

Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Research Interest

My research focuses on post-training techniques (e.g., reinforcement learning) for LLMs and MLLMs. I am currently working on two directions: (i) alignment and reasoning for LLMs and MLLMs, and (ii) long-horizon LLM agents capable of reliable planning, interaction, and adaptation.

Agentic & Multimodal Reasoning

Reasoning, grounding, and execution scaffolds for multimodal and agentic systems.

ECCV'26 VIGIL ECCV'26 SpaMem Preprint'26 Agent Harness Survey Information Fusion'26 VLA Policy Reasoning

Efficient Model Adaptation & Personalization

Parameter-efficient adaptation, prompt discovery, and personalized vision-language models.

ACL'26 StructLoRA ACL Findings'26 HyperAdaLoRA EMNLP Findings'25 Sensitivity-LoRA ACM MM'26 Layer-Wise Allocation ECCV'26 Prompt Fusion ECCV'26 In-Context Prompt Tuning TMLR'26 Cascaded Semantics TMLR'26 Prompt Adaptation Survey ACM MM'25 VIPT ICCV'25 MagicID

Alignment & Representation Learning

Representation geometry, alignment objectives, and post-training signals for reliable intelligence.

ICML'26 Dispersion Loss CVPR'26 fMRI-LM

Efficient Generative & Vision Systems

Efficient generation, dataset distillation, weather modeling, and scalable vision systems.

CVPR'26 Straight Flows CVPR'26 HIERAMP AAAI'26 CAD-VAE ECCV'26 Sparse Weather Routing SC'25 ORBIT-2

News

2026

[08] We are organizing the 1st Latent Visual Reasoning (LVR) Workshop at WACV 2027. See you in Orlando!
[08] Join Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Research Scientist Intern again!
[07] One paper accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research!
[07] One paper accepted by ACM MM 2026!
[06] Five papers accepted by ECCV 2026!
[05] New preprint is out: Agent Harness Engineering: A Survey.
[05] Recognized as an ICML 2026 Silver Reviewer.
[05] One paper accepted by MICCAI 2026!
[05] Join Amazon AGI as an Applied Scientist Intern!
[04] One paper accepted by ICML 2026!
[04] Two papers accepted by ACL 2026 (one Main conference, one Findings)! See you in San Diego!
[03] One paper accepted by ICME 2026!
[02] Three papers accepted by CVPR 2026! See you in Denver!
[01] One paper accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research!
[01] Two papers accepted by ICASSP 2026 Oral 🏆!

2025

[12] 🎉 Received a Tinker Research Grant ($5,000) from Thinking Machines Lab to support my post-training related research!
[11] One paper accepted by SC 2025 — Best Paper Award 🏆 Deeply honored to be the only student author.
[11] 🎉 Big News: Our Work Was Featured by AMD! Read the story
[11] Two papers accepted by WACV 2026!
[11] One paper accepted by AAAI 2026!
[09] One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2025! See you in San Diego!
[09] One paper accepted by WACV 2026! Round 1 Acceptance (85/1329 ≈ 6.4%)
[08] One paper accepted by EMNLP 2025 (Findings)!
[07] Our work selected as a finalist for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize 🏆
[07] One paper accepted by COLM 2025!
[07] One paper accepted by ACM MM 2025!
[06] One paper accepted by ICCV 2025!
[05] One paper accepted by ECML-PKDD 2025!
[05] Join Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Research Scientist Intern!

2024

[12] One paper accepted by ICASSP 2025!
[01] Started Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham!

Selected Publications Selected work; see the full list on Google Scholar. * indicates equal contribution.

2026

Adapting Vision Foundation Models with Cascaded Semantics

Xi Xiao, Xingjian Li, Cheng Han, Tianyang Wang, Lin Zhao, Yunbei Zhang, Guosheng Hu, Runmin Jiang, Xi Li, Xiao Wang, Min Xu

TMLR 2026 Paper Project

Staying VIGILant: Mitigating Visual Laziness via Counterfactual Visual Alignment in MLLMs

Xi Xiao, Chen Liu, Chih-Ting Liao, Yunbei Zhang, Qizhen Lan, Yuxiang Wei, Lin Zhao, Janet Wang, Jianyang Gu, Muchao Ye, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu

ECCV 2026 Paper Project

Layer-Specific Prompt Fusion Discovery via Differentiable Search in Vision Foundation Models

Xi Xiao, Xingjian Li, Yunbei Zhang, Cheng Han, Tianming Liu, Tianyang Wang, Runmin Jiang, Jihun Hamm, Xiao Wang, Min Xu

ECCV 2026 Paper Project

Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation

Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu

ACL 2026 Paper Project

Rethinking Layer-Wise Information Allocation for Vision Foundation Model Adaptation

Yuqi Li*, Xi Xiao*, Yunbei Zhang, Lin Zhao, Yu Li, Aiden Zhao, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu, Yingli Tian

ACM MM 2026 Paper Project

Dispersion Loss Counteracts Embedding Condensation and Improves Generalization in Small Language Models

Chen Liu*, Xingzhi Sun*, Xi Xiao*, Alexandre Van Tassel*, Ke Xu, Kristof Reimann, Danqi Liao, Mark Gerstein, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Smita Krishnaswamy

ICML 2026 Paper Project

Prompt-based Adaptation in Large-scale Vision Models: A Survey

Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Lin Zhao, Yiyang Liu, Xiaoying Liao, Zheda Mai, Xingjian Li, Xiao Wang, Hao Xu, Jihun Hamm, Xue Lin, Min Xu, Qifan Wang, Tianyang Wang, Cheng Han

TMLR 2026 Paper Project

2025

Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning

Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Xingjian Li, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Yuxiang Wei, Jihun Hamm, Min Xu

ACM MM 2025 Paper Project

MagicID: Hybrid Preference Optimization for ID-Consistent and Dynamic-Preserved Video Customization

Hengjia Li*, Lifan Jiang*, Xi Xiao*, Tianyang Wang, Hongwei Yi, Boxi Wu, Deng Cai

ICCV 2025 Paper Project

ORBIT-2: Scaling Exascale Vision Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Downscaling

Xiao Wang, Jong-Youl Choi, Takuya Kurihaya, Isaac Lyngaas, Hong-Jun Yoon, Xi Xiao, David Pugmire, Ming Fan, Nasik M. Nafi, Aristeidis Tsaris, Ashwin M. Aji, Maliha Hossain, Mohamed Wahib, Dali Wang, Peter Thornton, Prasanna Balaprakash, Moetasim Ashfaq, Dan Lu

SC 2025 Paper Project AMD story

Best Paper Award, Gordon Bell Prize Finalist
Work conducted during an internship at ORNL
In collaboration with ORNL, RIKEN, AMD, and NVIDIA

View all publications

Awards & Honors

[2026] ICML 2026 Silver Reviewer.
[2025] Best Paper Award, SC 2025 for ORBIT-2: Scaling Exascale Vision Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Downscaling.
[2025] Finalist, ACM Gordon Bell Prize (team award) for exascale climate foundation modeling on Frontier.
[2025] Tinker Research Grant ($5,000) from Thinking Machines Lab to support research on efficient post-training of large-scale models.

Miscellanea

Talks & Media

AMD story on ORBIT-2 and Frontier exascale climate modeling
UAB News: UAB students' research wins Best Paper Award at an international computing conference
More invited talks and interviews coming soon.

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026 Silver Reviewer
International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2026
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2026
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2026
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025
ACM Multimedia (MM) 2025, 2026

Journal Reviewer

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
Information Processing & Management (IPM)
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (TSMCA)
npj Digital Medicine
Remote Sensing of Environment (RSE)
Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing (MSSP)

Professional Membership

IEEE Graduate Student Member