Xi Xiao

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.

Open to research internships, visiting opportunities, and collaborations. If my work aligns with your interests or you just want to say Hi, I'd be delighted to connect:)

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

Experience

05/2026 - Present

Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon AGI

Seattle, Washington, USA

Supervised by Dr. Eric Zhao, Dr. Xiang Xu, and Dr. Youngeun Kim on MLLM Reasoning / Understanding.

05/2025 - 05/2026

Research Scientist Intern @ Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

Supervised by Dr. Xiao Wang on MLLM post-training and exascale distributed pretraining.

Education

01/2024 - 05/2028

Ph.D. in Computer Science

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Birmingham, Alabama, USA · Expected 2028

09/2019 - 06/2023

Bachelor's Degree in Artificial Intelligence

Sichuan University Jincheng College

Chengdu, Sichuan, China

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

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 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 (see full list here; indicates equal contribution*)

StructLoRA overview

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]

Dispersion Loss overview

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 [Project] [Paper]

Prompt-based adaptation survey

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

Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning

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]

MagicID project

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]

ORBIT-2 climate foundation model

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

View Other 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

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.

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