Yang Li

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor @ SJTU | Embodied AI · Multi-Agent Systems · AI4Science

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John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

✉️ yang.li.cs at sjtu dot edu dot cn

About Me

I am a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor (长聘教轨助理教授) at the John Hopcroft Center for Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. My research focuses on embodied multi-agent learning and AI applications especially in AI4Science and AI4Fusion. My long-term research goal is to develop large-scale embodied agent system that can reason, collaborate, adapt, and act efficiently in complex real-world scenarios.

Prior to joining SJTU, I was a Research Scientist with the Agent Team at Huawei London Research Center. I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, supervised by Dr. Wei Pan and co-supervised by Prof. Angelo Cangelosi. Before that, I received an M.Eng. in Information and Communication Engineering from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, jointly trained at ShanghaiTech University, advised by Prof. Jun Wang and Prof. Yang Yang, and a B.Eng. in Digital Media Technology from Dalian University of Technology.

Looking for Prospective Students

I welcome highly motivated students (undergraduates/masters/PhDs/RAs) interested in multi-agent/robot systems, embodied AI, or AI for Science/Nuclear to join my group. If you are interested, please feel free to contact me (yang.li.cs at sjtu dot edu dot cn)!

2026 PhD positions are available:

  • A Ph.D. position in embodied AI, multi-agent/robot learning starting in 2026 Sep, co-supervised with Prof. Weinan Zhang.
  • A Ph.D. position in AI for Nuclear starting in 2026 Sep, and more Ph.D. positions in MAS and embodied AI, co-supervised with Prof. Ying Wen.

News

Mar 08, 2026 New position paper available: “Position: Autonomous Scientific Discovery Needs Embodied Experimentation with Learnability” (co-first & co-corresponding author). We argue that autonomous scientific discovery requires embodied experimentation with learnability, and propose an Embodied Science Agent as a proof-of-concept that closes the loop between hypothesis generation, physical experimentation, and iterative learning.
Mar 08, 2026 I am serving as an Area Chair (AC) for IROS 2026.
Feb 21, 2026 New paper available: “PEPA: a Persistently Autonomous Embodied Agent with Personalities”, by Kaige Liu, Yang Li, Lijun Zhu, Weinan Zhang. arXiv.
Oct 29, 2025 New paper has been accepted by IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL). “VLM-SFD: VLM-Assisted Siamese Flow Diffusion Framework for Dual-Arm Cooperative Manipulation”, by Jiaming Chen, Yiyu Jiang, Aoshen Huang, Yang Li (Corresponding Author), Wei Pan. Early Access Link.

Selected Publications

  1. arXiv
    Adapting Like Humans: A Metacognitive Agent with Test-time Reasoning
    Yang Li, Zhiyuan He, Yuxuan Huang, and 5 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.23262, 2025
    PDF
  2. Under Review
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    Position: Autonomous Scientific Discovery Needs Embodied Experimentation with Learnability
    Yihang Chen, Zhongwei Yu, Yang Li, and 4 more authors
    2026
    PDF
  3. NeruIPS
    Aligning Individual and Collective Objectives in Multi-Agent Cooperation
    Yang Li, Wenhao Zhang, Jianhong Wang, and 4 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.12416, 2024
    PDF
  4. JAIR
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    Tackling Cooperative Incompatibility for Zero-Shot Human-AI Coordination
    Yang Li, Shao Zhang, Jichen Sun, and 5 more authors
    Journal of Artificial Intelligent Research, 2024
    PDF Code Website
  5. Under Review
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    HOLA-Drone: Hypergraphic Open-ended Learning for Zero-Shot Multi-Drone Cooperative Pursuit
    Yang Li, Dengyu Zhang, Junfan Chen, and 3 more authors
    2024
    Website
  6. ICML
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    Cooperative Open-ended Learning Framework for Zero-shot Coordination
    Yang Li, Shao Zhang, Jichen Sun, and 4 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 202:20470-20484, 2023. , 2023
    PDF Code Website
  7. TMLR
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    JiangJun: Mastering Xiangqi by Tackling Non-Transitivity in Two-Player Zero-Sum Games
    Yang Li, Kun Xiong, Yingping Zhang, and 6 more authors
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2023
    PDF Code Website
  8. IEEE TMC
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    Self-Supervised MAFENN for Classifying Low-labeled Distorted Images over Mobile Fading Channels
    Yang Li, Fanglei Sun, Jingchen Hu, and 8 more authors
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2023
    PDF Website
  9. TASLP
    Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Speech Generation
    Yang Li, Cheng Yu, Guangzhi Sun, and 7 more authors
    In , 2024
  10. ACL
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    Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Non-Autoregressive Text-to-Speech
    Yang Li, Cheng Yu, Guangzhi Sun, and 6 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) , 2022
    PDF

Selected Co-authored Publications

  1. ICML
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    Open Ad Hoc Teamwork with Cooperative Game Theory
    Jianhong Wang, Yang Li, Yuan Zhang, and 2 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.15259, 2024
    PDF Code Website
  2. ICML
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    Adaptive Advantage-Guided Policy Regularization for Offline Reinforcement Learning
    Tenglong Liu, Yang Li, Yixing Lan, and 3 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19909, 2024
    PDF Website
  3. ICLR
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    Ligs: Learnable intrinsic-reward generation selection for multi-agent learning
    David Henry Mguni, Taher Jafferjee, Jianhong Wang, and 7 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.02618, 2021
    PDF
  4. Under Review
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    Controlling Large Language Model-based Agents for Large-Scale Decision-Making: An Actor-Critic Approach
    Bin Zhang, Hangyu Mao, Jingqing Ruan, and 8 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.13884, 2023
    PDF
  5. IEEE TWC
    Multi-Agent Feedback Enabled Neural Networks for Intelligent Communications
    Fanglei Sun, Yang Li, Ying Wen, and 4 more authors
    IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2022
    PDF