Yao Xiao

PhD candidate @ UIUC CS

Email: ava_xiao@icloud.com

About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Derek Hoiem.

My research interests mainly lie in computer vision, especially in:

• Long-Form Video: Achieving maximum recall of related information using minimal memory storage.

• Multimodal Learning: Aligning vision and language into cohesive multimodal representations.

• Explainable AI: Unveiling model perceptions of the world to enable a transparent latent space.

I'm always happy to collaborate on interesting projects, especially with self-motivated grad or undergrad students. If you're into my works or just want to chat, feel free to drop me an email! 🌟 😄

Selected Work

TextRegion: Text-Aligned Region Tokens from Frozen Image-Text Models

Yao Xiao, Qiqian Fu, Heyi Tao, Yuqun Wu, Zhen Zhu, Derek Hoiem

Under Review.

[Paper] [Code]

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Teaching

• Teaching Assistant for CS 446: Machine Learning (Spring 2025). Instructor: Prof. Tong Zhang

Blog

• [05/17/2025] 博三小结

A space to share my thoughts and track my growth. I’ll keep it casual, so some posts may be in Mandarin.

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