Yaodong Yang 杨耀东 · Boya Young Scholar

Dr. Yaodong Yang is an Assistant Professor (Boya Young Scholar) at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University and Chief Scientist of the PKU–PsiBot Joint Laboratory. His research focuses on experience learning and alignment of AI / Embodied agents, aiming to advance the trustworthy deployment and real-world alignment of large models, spanning the areas of reinforcement learning, AI alignment, and embodied intelligence.

He has published over 200 papers in leading journals and conferences, including Nature Machine Intelligence, Cell Matter, Artificial Intelligence Journal, and IEEE TPAMI, with more than 16,000 Google Scholar citations. Since 2022, he has been ranked as the top scholar in AI & ML at Peking University according to CSRankings.

Dr. Yang has received numerous honors, including the ACL 2025 Best Paper Award, UKRI 2026 Best Paper Award in AI, ICCV 2023 Best Paper Finalist, CoRL 2020 Best System Paper Award, and the AAMAS 2021 Blue Sky Idea Award.

He was named to the MIT Technology Review "AI 100 Young Innovators", the 2025 Forbes China Technology & Innovation Innovative Leader list, received the WAIC 2022 "Yunfan Star Award", and the ACM SIGAI China Rising Star Award. His work has been featured by CCTV, People's Daily, Xinhua News, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and MIT Technology Review.

He serves as an Area Chair for major conferences including ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS, and IROS, and as an Associate Editor for Scientific Reports, Transactions on Machine Learning Research, and Neural Networks.

Previously, Dr. Yang was an Assistant Professor at King's College London, a Principal Researcher at Huawei Research U.K., and a Senior Manager at AIG. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Science and Technology of China, M.Sc. from Imperial College London, and Ph.D. from University College London, where he was the university's sole nominee for the ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award.