Jiayuan Mao 茅佳源

News

• To junior PhD/master/undergraduate students: if you would like to chat about life, career plan, or research ideas related to AI/ML, feel free to email me to schedule a meeting. I will dedicate 30 mins every week for such meetings. I encourage students from underrepresented groups to reach out and will prioritize these meetings.

  Underrepresented groups: including but not limited to gender/racial/ethnic minority groups.

• I will be giving a talk at the Coordinated Science Laboratory Student Conference (CSLSC 2024) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• I will be giving a talk at the NucLeaR (Neuro-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning in the Era of Large Language Models) workshop at AAAI 2024.
• I will be giving a talk at the Robot Representations For Scene Understanding, Reasoning and Planning workshop at RSS 2023. (Slides / Video)
• I'm co-organizing the Visually Grounded Interaction and Language (VIGIL) workshop at NAACL 2021.
• I'm co-organizing the Neuro-Symbolic Visual Reasoning and Program Synthesis tutorial at CVPR 2020.

Research Highlights

My long-term research goal is to build machines that can continually learn concepts (e.g., properties, relations, skills, rules and algorithms) from their experiences and apply them for reasoning and planning in the physical world. The central theme of my research is to decompose the learning problem into learning a vocabulary of neuro-symbolic concepts. The symbolic part describes their structures and how different concepts can be composed; the neural part handles grounding in perception and physics. I leverage structures to make learning more data-efficient, more compositionally generalizable, and also inference and planning faster.