Yanlai Yang

I am a third-year Ph.D student in Computer Science at NYU Courant, advised by Prof. Mengye Ren in the CILVR Lab. Starting Fall 2024, I also work as a Visiting Researcher at Meta.

Prior to joining NYU, I got my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Applied Math at UC Berkeley, where I was fortunate to do research as part of the Robotic AI & Learning Lab, advised by Dr. Frederik Ebert and Prof. Sergey Levine.

I was a recipient of the Mark D. Weiser Excellence in Computing Scholarship and the Outstanding Student Instructor Award at UC Berkeley.

Email / CV / Google Scholar / Github / Bridge

Research

My current research focuses on machine learning, lifelong learning, and computer vision.

Conference Papers

	Memory Storyboard: Leveraging Temporal Segmentation for Streaming Self-Supervised Learning from Egocentric Videos Yanlai Yang, Mengye Ren CoLLAs 2025 arXiv
	Reawakening Knowledge: Anticipatory Recovery from Catastrophic Interference via Structured Training Yanlai Yang, Matt Jones, Michael C. Mozer, Mengye Ren NeurIPS 2024 arXiv / code
	Pre-Training for Robots: Offline RL Enables Learning New Tasks from a Handful of Trials Aviral Kumar^, Anikait Singh^, Frederik Ebert^, Mitsuhiko Nakamoto, Yanlai Yang, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine RSS 2023* arXiv / code
	Bridge Data: Boosting Generalization of Robotic Skills with Cross-Domain Datasets Frederik Ebert^, Yanlai Yang^, Karl Schmeckpeper, Bernadette Bucher, Georgios Georgakis, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine RSS 2022 project page (new) / project page (old) / arXiv / code / blog post
	Garbage In, Garbage Out? Do Machine Learning Application Papers in Social Computing Report Where Human-Labeled Training Data Comes From? R. Stuart Geiger, Kevin Yu, Yanlai Yang, Mindy Dai, Jie Qiu, Rebekah Tang, Jenny Huang ACM FAT^ 2020*

Preprints, Workshop Papers and Academic Reports

LifelongMemory: Leveraging LLMs for Answering Queries in Egocentric Videos
Ying Wang, Yanlai Yang, Mengye Ren
Preprint
project page / arXiv / code

Egocentric Video Comprehension via Large Language Model Inner Speech
Ying Wang, Dongdong Sun, Rui Chen, Yanlai Yang, Mengye Ren
3rd International Ego4D Workshop @ CVPR 2023
Paper / code

Multi-Task Learning Architectures and Applications
Andy Yan, Xin Wang, Yanlai Yang, Roy Fox, Xiaolong Wang, Joseph Gonzalez
Technical Report, 2020

Teaching

Section Leader, DS-GA 1003 Machine Learning, Spring 2023

Teaching Assistant, NYU AI School 2024

Summer Session Lecturer, CS188 Intro to Artificial Intelligence, Summer 2022

Head Undergraduate Student Instructor, CS188 Spring 2022

Undergraduate Student Instructor, CS188 Fall 2021

Undergraduate Student Instructor, CS188 Spring 2021

Undergraduate Student Instructor, CS188 Fall 2020

Undergraduate Student Instructor, CS188 Spring 2020

Reader, CS70 Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory, Fall 2019

Reader, CS70 Summer 2019

Service

I served as reviewer for the following conferences and workshops:

CoLLAs (Technical Reviewer, 2024-25), NeurIPS (2024), WACV (2025), ICLR (2025), AISTATS (2025), CVPR (2025), ICML (2025), ICCV (2025).

CoRL 2023 Workshop "Towards Reliable and Deployable Learning-Based Robotic Systems," NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Adaptive Foundation Models.

Acknowledgements

In addition to the co-authors listed in the research papers above, I would like to thank Prof. Pieter Abbeel and Prof. Stas Tiomkin for being my research advisors when I was an undergraduate researcher at the UC Berkeley Robotic Learning Lab.

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