Yang Yang AI Research Scientist, Meta Email: st2yang [at] gmail.com (preferred) yzyang [at] meta.com yang5276 [at] umn.edu

About me

I am a Staff AI Research Scientist at Meta, working on AI agents and large-scale recommendation systems. Recent work: AI agents for ML engineering: STARK [ICLR ’26], ArchPilot; LLMs for Recommendation Systems (LLM4Rec): Unity [KDD ’26], Semantic ID [RecSys ’25], User-Centric Ranking [KDD ’23].

My Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota focused on language-guided robotic grasping and embodied perception (ICRA ’22 Outstanding Student Paper Award, T-RO ’24).

Happy to chat about AI agents, LLM4Rec, and embodied AI.

Professional Experience

• Meta, Bellevue, WA | Since March 2022
  Staff AI Research Scientist (Tech Lead), AI agents and LLMs for Recommendation.

• Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA | Summer 2020
  Research Intern, Computer Vision.

• Google, Mountain View, CA | Summer 2018
  Software Engineering Intern, Visual-Inertial Systems.

Publications

See Google Scholar for the complete list.

LLMs, Agents & Generative Models

• STARK: Strategic Team of Agents for Refining Kernels [PDF]
  Juncheng Dong, Yang Yang, Tao Liu, Yang Wang, Feng Qi, Vahid Tarokh, Kaushik Rangadurai, Shuang Yang
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
  

• ArchPilot: A Proxy-Guided Multi-Agent Approach for Machine Learning Engineering [PDF]
  Zhuowen Yuan, Tao Liu, Yang Yang, Yang Wang, Feng Qi, Kaushik Rangadurai, Bo Li, Shuang Yang
  ICLR Workshop on MAL-GAI, 2026
  

• Tokenize, Diffuse, Decode: A Generative Approach to Neighborhood Discovery on Graphs [PDF]
  Zhuowen Yuan, Tao Liu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Yang Yang, Minhui Huang, Yiping Han, Bo Li, Shuang Yang
  ICLR Workshop on DeLTa, 2026
  

• GraphQ-LM: Scalable Graph Representation for Large Language Models via Residual Vector Quantization [PDF]
  Jiawei Zhang, Yang Yang, Kaushik Rangadurai, Tao Liu, Minhui Huang, Yiping Han, Bo Li, Shuang Yang
  Under review, NeurIPS 2026
  

Recommender Systems

• Unity: Fully Self-Supervised Pretraining with Transformers for Recommendation [PDF]
  Shuang Yang, Yang Yang, Tao Liu, Feng Qi, Kaushik Rangadurai, Luke Simon, Sandeep Pandey
  ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2026
  

• Enhancing Embedding Representation Stability in Recommendation Systems with Semantic ID [PDF]
  Carolina Zheng, Minhui Huang, Dmitrii Pedchenko, Kaushik Rangadurai, Siyu Wang, Gaby Nahum, Jie Lei, Yang Yang, et al.
  ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys), 2025
  

• Breaking the Curse of Quality Saturation with User-Centric Ranking [PDF]
  Zhuokai Zhao, Yang Yang, Wenyu Wang, Chihuang Liu, Yu Shi, Wenjie Hu, Haotian Zhang, Shuang Yang
  ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2023
  

Embodied AI & Robotics

• A Parameter-Efficient Tuning Framework for Language-Guided Object Grounding and Robot Grasping [PDF]
  Houjian Yu, Yang Yang, Mingen Li, Alireza Rezazadeh, Yiming Lu, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
  

• Attribute-Based Robotic Grasping with Data-Efficient Adaptation [PDF] [Website] [Video]
  Yang Yang, Houjian Yu, Xibai Lou, Yuanhao Liu, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2024
  

• Adversarial Object Rearrangement in Constrained Environments with Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks [PDF] [Website] [Video]
  Xibai Lou, Houjian Yu, Ross Worobel, Yang Yang, Paul Rosen, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023
  

• IOSG: Image-Driven Object Searching and Grasping [PDF] [Website]
  Houjian Yu, Xibai Lou, Yang Yang, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023
  

• Interactive Robotic Grasping with Attribute-Guided Disambiguation [PDF] [Website] [Video]
  Yang Yang, Xibai Lou, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022 (Outstanding Student Paper Award)
  

• Learning Object Relations with Graph Neural Networks for Target-Driven Grasping in Dense Clutter [PDF] [Website]
  Xibai Lou, Yang Yang, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022
  

• A Deep Learning Approach to Grasping the Invisible [PDF] [Website] [Code]
  Yang Yang, Hengyue Liang, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2020
  

• Attribute-Based Robotic Grasping with One-Grasp Adaptation [PDF] [Website]
  Yang Yang, Yuanhao Liu, Hengyue Liang, Xibai Lou, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021
  

• Collision-Aware Target-Driven Object Grasping in Constrained Environments [PDF]
  Xibai Lou, Yang Yang, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021
  

• Learning Visual Affordances with Target-Orientated Deep Q-Network [PDF] [Website]
  Hengyue Liang, Xibai Lou, Yang Yang, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021
  

• Learning to Generate 6-DoF Grasp Poses with Reachability Awareness [PDF] [Website]
  Xibai Lou, Yang Yang, Changhyun Choi
  IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020
  

• Attitude Tracking from a Camera and an Accelerometer on Gyro-less Devices
  Tien Do, Leo Neira, Yang Yang, Stergios I. Roumeliotis
  International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), 2019