Welcome!

I’m a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where I work with Prof. Ashton Anderson on human behavior modeling using AI/ML. My research focuses on understanding and modeling human decision-making, particularly in strategic domains such as chess ♟️, where I explore the fascinating intersection of artificial intelligence and human cognition and behavior.

You’ll likely find me staying active through sports and outdoor activities. I’m passionate about basketball 🏀, badminton 🏸, billiards 🎱, and cycling 🚴‍♂️ – each offering its own unique blend of strategy, skill, and physical challenge that often inspires and motivates my academic work.

Born in Shenyang and raised in Beijing 🇨🇳, the transition to Toronto 🇨🇦 felt natural thanks to the familiar northern latitude and climate ❄️ - WE THE NORTH!

News

• Jul 2025: 🎉 I passed the Thesis Topic Approval checkpoint, officially a PhD candidate now!
• Jul 2025: ♟️ Maia Chess is now in open beta! Powered by Maia-2, you can play against the most human-like chess AI, analyze games with human-aware AI, and train with Maia as your personal coach.
• Jul 2025: SEAM: Semantically Equivalent Across Modalities Benchmark for Vision-Language Models was accepted by COLM 2025, see you in Montreal!
• Apr 2025: Two extended abstracts about human behavior modeling in chess were accepted by IC2S2 2025
• Dec 2024: I passed the PhD Qualifying Exam!
• Sep 2024: ♟️ Maia-2: A Unified Model for Human-AI Alignment in Chess was accepted by NeurIPS 2024 [preprint], try it out on Lichess (join A/B test) @ [Lichess Bot], see you in Vancouver!

Education

🎓 Ph.D in Computer Science
University of Toronto | Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦 | Sep 2022 - present

Human Behavior Modeling with AI/ML
Supervisor: Prof. Ashton Anderson
Supervisory Committee Members: Prof. Chris Maddison and Prof. Colin Raffel

🎓 M.S. in Computer Science
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) | Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦 | Jan 2021 - May 2022

Knowledge Representation Learning, Knowledge Graphs, and Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning
Supervisors: Prof. Xiangliang Zhang and Prof. Robert Hoehndorf

🎓 B.S. in Electrical Engineering
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications | Beijing, China 🇨🇳 | Sep 2016 - Jun 2020

Experience

Faculty Affiliated Researcher
Vector Institute | Nov 2022 - Present | Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦

Visiting Scholar
L3S Research Center | Jun 2022 - Aug 2022 | Hannover, Germany 🇩🇪

Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning and Bioinformatics
Supervised by Prof. Robert Hoehndorf and Prof. Maria-Esther Vidal

Research Intern
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences | Jul 2020 - Jan 2021 | Beijing, China 🇨🇳

Transfer Learning and Recommender Systems
Supervised by Dr. Yongchun Zhu and Prof. Fuzhen Zhuang

Research Intern
Baidu Research | Oct 2019 - Jun 2020 | Beijing, China 🇨🇳

City Computing and User Modeling at Business Intelligence Lab
Supervised by Dr. Jingbo Zhou and Prof. Hui Xiong

Visiting Student
University of Washington | Jun 2018 - Aug 2018 | Seattle, United States 🇺🇸

Professional Service

📋 Conference Reviewer/PC Member

NeurIPS (2024, 2025)
ICML (2025)
ICLR (2025)
AAAI (2024, 2025, 2026)
IJCAI (2024, 2025)
KDD (2024, 2025)
WWW (2024, 2025)
AISTATS (2025)
ACML (2025)
IJCLR-NeSy (2022)

📚 Journal Reviewer

ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
Elsevier Information Processing and Management (IP&M)
Elsevier Information Fusion
Elsevier Information Systems

👨‍🏫 Teaching Experience

Introduction to Computer Programming - University of Toronto (Fall 2022)
Introduction to Artificial Intelligence - University of Toronto (Winter 2023)