Xi Xiao

Research Interest

I have broad interests in Computer Vision and Language Models. Recently, I'm focusing on MLLM Agent and their Reasoning methods.

• Language Model & Pretraining & Post-training: [ICML'26] [CVPR'26] [SC'25]
• Efficient Model Adaptation: [ACL'26] [ACL Findings'26] [TMLR'26] [ACM MM'25] [NeurIPS'25] [EMNLP Findings'25]
• Efficient-Computer Vision: [CVPR'26] [CVPR'26] [AAAI'26] [ICCV'25] [COLM'25]

News

Selected Publications (see full list here; * indicates equal contribution)

Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation
ACL 2026 [Paper] [Code]

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Chen Liu*, Xingzhi Sun*, Xi Xiao*, Alexandre Van Tassel*, Ke Xu, Kristof Reimann, Danqi Liao, Mark Gerstein, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Smita Krishnaswamy
Dispersion Loss Counteracts Embedding Condensation and Improves Generalization in Small Language Models
ICML 2026 [Paper]

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Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Lin Zhao, Yiyang Liu, et al.
Prompt-based Adaptation in Large-scale Vision Models: A Survey
TMLR 2026 [Paper] [Resources]
A comprehensive survey of visual prompt tuning and prompting for large vision models

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Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Xingjian Li, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Yuxiang Wei, Jihun Hamm, Min Xu
Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning
ACM MM 2025 [Paper] [Code]

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Hengjia Li*, Lifan Jiang*, Xi Xiao*, Tianyang Wang, Hongwei Yi, Boxi Wu, Deng Cai
MagicID: Hybrid Preference Optimization for ID-Consistent and Dynamic-Preserved Video Customization
ICCV 2025 [Project] [Paper] [Code]

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Chenrui Ma, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Yanning Shen
Learning Straight Flows: Variational Flow Matching for Efficient Generation
CVPR 2026 [Paper]
In collaboration with ORNL

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Chenrui Ma, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Yanning Shen
CAD-VAE: Leveraging Correlation-Aware Latents for Comprehensive Fair Disentanglement
AAAI 2026 [Paper] [Code]
In collaboration with ORNL

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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
ORBIT-2: Scaling Exascale Vision Foundation Models for Weather and Climate Downscaling
SC 2025 [Paper] [Code] [AMD story]
Best Paper Award, Gordon Bell Prize Finalist
In collaboration with ORNL, RIKEN, AMD, and NVIDIA

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Other Publications

1. Junjie Li*, Xi Xiao*, Yunbei Zhang*, Chen Liu*, Lin Zhao, Xiaoying Liao, Yingrui Ji, Janet Wang, Jianyang Gu, Yingqiang Ge, Weijie Xu, Xi Fang, Xiang Xu, Tianchen (Eric) Zhao, Youngeun Kim, Tianyang Wang, Jihun Hamm, Smita Krishnaswamy, Jun (Luke) Huan, Chandan Reddy
   Agent Harness Engineering: A Survey
   Preprint 2026 PaperCode

1. Mengchen Fan, Baocheng Geng, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Siyuan Mei, Pulin Che, Xiaoqian Jiang, Qizhen Lan
   Detail Consistent Stage-Wise Distillation for Efficient 3D MRI Segmentation
   MICCAI 2026 Early Accept (Top 9%)
2. Xi Xiao, Aristeidis Tsaris, Anika Tabassum, John Lagergren, Larry M. York, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang
   FOCUS: Fused Observation of Channels for Unveiling Spectra
   ICME 2026 Paper
3. Hao Zhang, Zhenjia Li, Runfeng Bao, Xi Xiao, Yifan Gao, Heng Zhang, Shuyang Zhang, Bo Huang, Yuhang Wu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
   HyperAdaLoRA: Accelerating LoRA Rank Allocation During Training via Hypernetworks without Sacrificing Performance
   ACL Findings 2026 Paper
4. Yuxiang Wei, Yanteng Zhang, Xi Xiao, Chengxuan Qian, Tianyang Wang, Vince D. Calhoun
   fMRI-LM: Towards a Universal Foundation Model for Language-Aligned fMRI Understanding
   CVPR 2026 PaperCode
5. Lin Zhao, Xinru Jiang, Xi Xiao, Qihui Fan, Lei Lu, Yanzhi Wang, Xue Lin, Octavia Camps, Pu Zhao, Jianyang Gu
   HIERAMP: Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Amplification for Generative Dataset Distillation
   CVPR 2026 Paper
6. Yu Li, Da Chang, Xi Xiao
   KG-SAM: Injecting Anatomical Knowledge into Segment Anything Models via Conditional Random Fields
   ICASSP 2026 Oral Paper
7. Zhuxuanzi Wang, Mingqiao Mo, Xi Xiao, Chen Liu, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Xiao Wang, Smita Krishnaswamy, Tianyang Wang
   CTR-LoRA: Curvature-Aware and Trust-Region Guided Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models
   ICASSP 2026 Oral Paper
8. Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Janet Wang, Lin Zhao, Yuxiang Wei, Hengjia Li, Yanshu Li, Xiao Wang, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Hao Xu, Tianyang Wang
   RoadBench: A Vision-Language Foundation Model and Benchmark for Road Damage Understanding
   WACV 2026 Paper
9. Xi Xiao, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Mingqiao Mo, Chen Liu, Chenrui Ma, Yanshu Li, Smita Krishnaswamy, Xiao Wang, Tianyang Wang
   Self-Supervised Visual Prompting for Cross-Domain Road Damage Detection
   WACV 2026 PaperCode
10. Yuxiang Wei, Yanteng Zhang, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Vince D. Calhoun
    4D Multimodal Co-Attention Fusion Network with Latent Contrastive Alignment for Alzheimer's Diagnosis
    WACV 2026 Paper
11. Yuxiang Wei, Yanteng Zhang, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Vince D. Calhoun
    MoRE-Brain: Routed Mixture of Experts for Interpretable and Generalizable Cross-Subject fMRI Visual Decoding
    NeurIPS 2025 PaperCode
12. Hao Zhang, Bo Huang, Zhenjia Li, Xi Xiao, Hui Yi Leong, Zumeng Zhang, Xinwei Long, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
    Sensitivity-LoRA: Low-Load Sensitivity-Based Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models
    EMNLP Findings 2025 Paper
13. Xi Xiao, Zhengji Li, Wentao Wang, Jiacheng Xie, Houjie Lin, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Tianyang Wang, Min Xu
    TD-RD: A Top-Down Benchmark with Real-Time Framework for Road Damage Detection
    ICASSP 2025 Paper
14. Yanshu Li, Yi Cao, Hongyang He, Qisen Cheng, Xiang Fu, Xi Xiao, Tianyang Wang, Ruixiang Tang
    M²IV: Towards Efficient and Fine-Grained Multimodal In-Context Learning via Representation Engineering
    COLM 2025 Paper

1. Aokun Liang, Xi Xiao, Xiangyun Hu, Tao Ke, Tianyang Wang, Yibing Xiong, Huiwei Jiang, Xiao Wang
   GeoPriorCLIP: A Foundational Remote Sensing Vision-Language Model Enhanced with Cascaded Geographic Information Priors
   Geo-spatial Information Science Paper
2. Shunlei Li, Longsen Gao, Jin Wang, Chang Che, Xi Xiao, Jiuwen Cao, Yingbai Hu, Hamid Reza Karimi
   Information-Theoretic Graph Fusion with Vision-Language-Action Model for Policy Reasoning and Dual Robotic Control
   Information Fusion Paper
3. Chenshen Huang*, Haoyun Xia*, Xi Xiao*, Hong Chen, Yiqing Jiang, Yahui Lyu, Zhizhan Ni, Tianyang Wang, Ning Wang, Qi Huang
   Geometric Multi-Instance Learning for Weakly Supervised Gastric Cancer Segmentation
   npj Digital Medicine Paper

1. Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Ba-Thinh Lam, Janet Wang, Lin Zhao, Jihun Hamm, Tianyang Wang, Xingjian Li, Xiao Wang, Hao Xu, Tianming Liu, Min Xu
   Describe Anything in Medical Images
   ICML 2025 Workshop on FM4LS Paper
2. Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Yanshu Li, Xingjian Li, Tianyang Wang, Jihun Hamm, Xiao Wang, Min Xu
   Visual Variational Autoencoder Prompt Tuning
   CVPR 2025 Workshop on FGVC Paper

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Alabama at Birmingham
01/2024 – 05/2028 (Expected)
Birmingham, Alabama, USA

Bachelor’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence, Sichuan University Jincheng College
09/2019 – 06/2023
Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Experience

Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon (AWS AI Labs)
05/2026 – Present
Seattle, Washington, USA
Supervised by Dr. Eric Zhao and Dr. Youngeun Kim on MLLM Reasoning / Understanding.

Research Scientist Intern, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
05/2025 – 05/2026
Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
Supervised by Dr. Xiao Wang on MLLM's post-training, and exascale distributed pretraining.

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

Reviewer for MICCAI 2026, ICML 2026, CVPR 2026, ECCV 2026, AAAI 2026, NeurIPS 2025, ACM MM 2025, TMLR, IEEE TCSVT, IEEE TMM, IEEE TSMCA, npj Digital Medicine, MSSP.