Xi Xiao at Harvard University
“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!

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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 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 earlier research focused on understanding and shaping the intelligence and behavior of foundation models through post-training techniques. I'm currently extending this focus to agents, exploring how reinforcement learning (RL) and other post-training techniques can improve their capabilities and behavior, with a particular focus on agent memory, harness engineering, recursive self-improvement (RSI), and reasoning.

News

2026
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
Cascaded Semantics
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 2026PaperProject
Staying VIGILant
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 2026PaperProject
Layer-specific prompt fusion
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 2026PaperProject
StructLoRA overview
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 2026PaperProject
Layer-wise information allocation for vision foundation model adaptation
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 2026PaperProject
Dispersion Loss overview
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 2026PaperProject
Prompt-based adaptation survey
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 2026PaperProject
2025
Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning
Visual Instance-aware Prompt Tuning
Xi Xiao, Yunbei Zhang, Xingjian Li, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Yuxiang Wei, Jihun Hamm, Min Xu
ACM MM 2025PaperProject
MagicID 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 2025PaperProject
ORBIT-2 climate foundation model
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 2025PaperProjectAMD 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

Miscellanea

Talks & Media

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 Activities