Research Interest

I have broad interests in Computer Vision and Language Models. I aim to build efficient and robust intelligent systems that can perform reliably in extreme scenarios with limited data, limited compute, and limited storage resources. Recently, I'm focusing on Computer-Use Agents and their Adaptation methods.

• Language Model & Pretraining & Post-training: [CVPR'26] [arXiv'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

• [04/2026] Two papers accepted by ACL 2026 (one Main conference, one Findings)! See you in San Diego!
• [03/2026] One paper accepted by ICME 2026!
• [02/2026] Three papers accepted by CVPR 2026! See you in Denver!
• [02/2026] I will join Amazon as an Applied Scientist Intern this summer! See you in Seattle!
• [01/2026] One paper accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research!
• [01/2026] Two papers accepted by ICASSP 2026 Oral 🏆!
• [12/2025] 🎉 Received a Tinker Research Grant ($5,000) from Thinking Machines Lab to support my post-training related research!
• [11/2025] One paper accepted by SC 2025 — Best Paper Award 🏆 Deeply honored to be the only student author.
• [11/2025] 🎉 Big News: Our Work Was Featured by AMD! Read the story
• [11/2025] Two papers accepted by WACV 2026!
• [11/2025] One paper accepted by AAAI 2026!
• [09/2025] One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2025! See you in San Diego!
• [09/2025] One paper accepted by WACV 2026! Round 1 Acceptance (85/1329 ≈ 6.4%)
• [08/2025] One paper accepted by EMNLP 2025 (Findings)!
• [07/2025] Our work selected as a finalist for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize 🏆
• [07/2025] One paper accepted by COLM 2025!
• [07/2025] One paper accepted by ACM MM 2025!
• [06/2025] One paper accepted by ICCV 2025!
• [05/2025] One paper accepted by ECML-PKDD 2025!
• [05/2025] Join Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Research Scientist Intern!
• [12/2024] One paper accepted by ICASSP 2025!
• [01/2024] Started Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham!

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
arXiv 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] [Code]
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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Education

• Ph.D. Student advised by Dr. Yingyan (Celine) Lin, Jan. 2023 - May 2025
  School of Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Ph.D. Student advised by Dr. Yingyan (Celine) Lin, Aug. 2019 - Dec. 2022
  Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University
• Bachelor’s Degree in Applied Physics & Computer Science, Aug. 2015 - Jun. 2019
  School of the Gifted Young, University of Science and Technology of China

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 – 08/2026 (Expected)
Seattle, Washington, USA

Research Scientist Intern, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
05/2025 – 05/2026
Knoxville, Tennessee, USA
Working with Dr. Xiao Wang on large-scale climate models (e.g., ORBIT-2), efficient post-training, and exascale distributed training.

Awards & Honors

• [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.