Wenqian Ye 叶文谦 (he/him)
University of Virginia
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Virginia, where I have the privilege of being advised by Prof. Aidong Zhang and Prof. Henry Kautz. Prior to UVA, I earned my M.S. in Computer Science from NYU Courant and my B.S. in Mathematics from UIUC, with minors in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. My research has been recognized with the KDD 2025 Best Paper Award and the John A. Stankovic Graduate Research Award.
I am actively seeking full-time roles in academia (tenure-track Assistant Professor) and industry (AI Research Scientist). Please feel free to contact me.
Research Interests
My north star is trustworthy AI that can safely achieve recursively self-improvement and drive autonomous scientific discovery from AGI to ASI. Below are the subtopics I have been working on.
- ML Foundation: OOD generalization, spurious correlations and Bayesian machine learning. Representative papers: Evidential Alignment, LRFormer, NeuronTune, ShortcutProbe.
- Safety Alignment: emergent/persistent misalignment in LLM agents. Representative papers: PRISM, AEA, SAGE, MM-SpuBench.
- AI for Scientific Discovery: recursively self-improving (RSI) agents, learning foundation in RLVR, and scientific discovery. Representative papers: ProofEvolve, DFE, EHRMamba, MpoxVLM.
- Applications: embodied AI and autonomous driving, and AI for health. Representative papers: LaMPilot, MAPLM, MaRs-VQA.
For a full list of papers, see the Publications page.
News
| Sep 2026 | One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2026. |
| Sep 2026 | One paper accepted at SIGIR-AP 2026. |
| Jun 2026 | One paper accepted at ECCV 2026. |
| May 2026 | One paper accepted at KDD 2026 (Research Track). |
| May 2026 | Started my Research Scientist Internship at Meta AI. |
| May 2026 | Honored to receive the John A. Stankovic Graduate Research Award. |
| Jan 2026 | Co-organizing the WDFM-EAI Workshop at CVPR 2026, led by Dr. Burhan Yaman. |
| Nov 2025 | One paper accepted at KDD 2026 (Datasets & Benchmarks Track). |
| Nov 2025 | One paper accepted at AAAI 2026. |
| Oct 2025 | Received the NeurIPS 2025 Scholar Award. |
| Oct 2025 | Passed the qualifying exam and am now officially a PhD candidate! |
| Sep 2025 | One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2025. See you in San Diego! |
| Aug 2025 | One co-authored paper accepted at CIKM 2025. |
| Aug 2025 | Our KDD paper received the Best Paper Award (1 of 3k+ submissions)! |
| May 2025 | Started my Applied Scientist Internship at Amazon AWS AI, Fundamental Research. |
| May 2025 | Papers accepted at KDD 2025, ICML 2025, and IJCAI 2025. |
| Apr 2025 | Program Chair for the ICLR 2025 Workshop on AI for Children. |
| Oct 2024 | MM-SpuBench selected as Oral at the RBFM Workshop, NeurIPS 2024. |
| Jul 2024 | One paper accepted at ECCV 2024. |
| May 2024 | One paper accepted at KDD 2024 (Research Track). |
| Feb 2024 | Two co-authored papers accepted at CVPR 2024. |
| May 2023 | One paper accepted at UAI 2023. |
| Aug 2023 | Joined the University of Virginia as a PhD student. |