Welcome! This is Yixuan Yang's Homepage.


Hi there! 🎾

[email protected]

[email protected]

Hi there from Yixuan! I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. I am currently a member of the Kamaleswaran Lab, where I am honored to be advised by Professor Rishi Kamaleswaran. My research focuses on World Models, Foundation Models for Electronic Health Records (EHR), and reasoning-enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) — exploring self-supervised pretraining and representation learning paradigms that capture the underlying dynamics of complex temporal data to support clinical decision-making. Prior to this, I worked in the General Robotics Lab during my first year under the supervision of Professor Boyuan Chen, exploring Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation and Embodied AI. My long-term goal is to advance the reasoning capabilities of foundation models — building intelligent systems that learn predictive world models and make robust decisions in complex, unstructured environments 🧠🤖.

I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. During my undergraduate studies, I was proud and fortunate to be supervised (Academic Advisor) by Chair Professor Xin Yao (Fellow, IEEE). In the Fall 2022 semester, I studied at the University of California, Berkeley as an exchange student and was honored to receive a recommendation letter from Professor Igor Mordatch. In my junior and senior years, I had the opportunity to be a visiting student in Professor Xinlei Chen's research group at Tsinghua University (Tsinghua University - UC Berkeley Research Institute).

News

  • [May 2023] I became a visiting student in Professor Xinlei Chen's lab. I worked with several Ph.D. and MS students in the project Gas Source Localization driven by Collaborative Robots.
  • [Jan. 2023] I joined Chair Professor Xin Yao (Fellow, IEEE)'s Lab, and started doing research in large-scale UFLP Problem.
  • [Aug. 2022] 🛫 I arrived at the United States to be an exchange student at UC Berkeley 😎. Hi California!!! (Cal's weather is soooooo fantastic!!! ☀️🥹)
  • [May 2022] I attended the Summer Workshop 2022 in the School of Computing at National University of Singapore (NUS). We used Unity to develop a networked 2D Game.
  • [Apr. 2021] I independently developed my very first computer science project in Java — a Minesweeper game! I received a perfect score for the course project. (Friendly reminder: ChatGPT didn't exist back then! 🤗)
  • [Aug. 2020] Excited to start my undergraduate studies in a very youthful and energetic university - Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China!
    (Always claimed to rank 8th in Mainland China 🤪🤣.)
  • [Jan. 2020] 😷🤒 Due to COVID-19, schools were shut down and I was locked down at home while preparing for the Gaokao.
  • [Aug. 2016] Honored to join Shimen High School (石门中学) (known as the best high school in Foshan 😎)! My colorful high school journey kicked off!
  • [Aug. 2013] I began my junior high journey at Shimen Experimental School (石门实验学校) (now renamed Shishi Experimental School), joining the English Specialty Class as a new student! (Originally, I was supposed to attend Nanhai Experimental Middle School (南海实验中学), but due to an unexpected twist of fate, I ended up at Shimen instead.)
  • [Apr. 2012] I got my Wechat account (much earlier than other people 😝)!
  • [Oct. 2008] When I was in second grade, I called the Foshan mayor's hotline 12345 to suggest building a footbridge connecting my home to the shopping mall across the road — and six months later, it was actually built.
  • [Sep. 2007] I started my elementary school journey in Nanshi Fuxiao (南师附小)!
  • [2007] I got my first Tencent QQ account 🐧!
  • [May 2004 ~ Jun. 2007] I spent a wonderful childhood at Beilei Kindergarten (Chancheng) and Huayuan Kindergarten (Guicheng) 👦!
  • [May 2001] I was born in this beautiful planet 🌏 (2001/05/30)!

Research Experiences

You can also check my Google Scholar profile.

  • Automated Lab: Scientific Lab Manipulation driven by Humanoid Robot (UNDER DEVELOPMENT)

    Advised by Professor Boyuan Chen in General Robotics Lab.
    Keywords: Humanoid Robot, Unitree G1, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Imitation Learning, Manipulation

    THIS PROJECT/PAPER IS NOT PUBLISHED YET DUE TO FUNDING AGENCY RESTRICTIONS

Signature Projects

  • Unsolvable Robotic Task Detection Using Synthetic Data Driven By LLM (LLaVA)

    Final Project: Duke ECE 590/ME 555 - Robot Learning (2024 Fall)
    Advised by Professor Boyuan Chen.

    [Paper] [Github]
  • Minesweeper++: A Feature-Rich Game Development with Java Swing GUI

    Final Project: SUSTech CS102A - Introduction to Computer Programming (Language: Java) (2021 Spring)
    Advised by Professor Yepang Liu.

    [Github]

Graduate Coursework at Duke (Cumulative GPA: 3.966/4.0)

Academic Service

  • Student Researcher: Invited by the North Carolina AI Leadership Council to support its Tech, Data, & Infrastructure team, hosted by the North Carolina Office of AI and Policy (Jan 2026 – Jun 2026). Provided background, baseline, and resource-mapping research to the Council and its subcommittees — work acknowledged in the official NC Statewide AI Strategic Roadmap, announced by Governor Josh Stein in Jul 2026.
  • Reviewer:
    • ACL Rolling Review (ARR, 2026)
    • ICLR 2026 Workshop on Foundation Models for Science (FM4Science, 2026)
    • IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (IEEE ICHI, 2026)
    • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (IEEE TCSVT, 2026)
    • IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (IEEE TMM, 2026)
    • IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (Intelligent Robotics SI, 2023)
  • Teaching assistant: DECISION 520Q/618: Data Science for Business (Fall 2024), Duke Fuqua School of Business

Miscellaneous

If you are interested in my personal life, please click HERE! (REMINDER - If you're in mainland China, you may need a VPN 🪜 to access this link.)

This site was last edited on Jul 2, 2026.