I am Yichao Du, a Physical AI Scientist at an early-stage Physical AI company. My research focuses on building foundation models that can reason, learn, and act in the physical world, bringing together multimodal understanding, agentic learning, and embodied intelligence. I am particularly interested in how models learn from feedback, use tools to solve complex tasks, and translate their understanding into reliable actions.

My current research spans four closely related directions:

  • Physical AI: connecting multimodal perception, reasoning, and action for embodied systems.
  • Agentic learning: tool-integrated reasoning, self-improvement, and reliable evaluation for autonomous agents.
  • Multimodal alignment: reward models, preference learning, and evaluation for trustworthy multimodal intelligence.
  • Multilingual intelligence: efficient speech translation, machine translation, retrieval augmentation, and federated adaptation.

I received my PhD in Computer Science (Data Science) from the University of Science and Technology of China, where I was advised by Prof. Enhong Chen. Previously, I worked as an Algorithm Expert (Alibaba Star, P7) at Alibaba Group's Token Hub, focusing on generative reward models and tool-integrated reasoning for LLM agents. My research experience also includes a visiting studentship at UNC-Chapel Hill and work with Stanford IRIS Lab. I also held research positions at Shanghai AI Laboratory, Tencent AI Lab, Alibaba DAMO Academy, and Huawei Cloud.

Our team is recruiting master's students, PhD students, and research interns. If you'd like to work with our team, please drop me an email with your CV!

Email: echaoustc AT gmail.com

Activities

Selected Awards and Honors

  • 1st Place, IWSLT End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Translation Track, 2023
  • National Scholarship for Graduate Students, Ministry of Education of P.R. China, 2022
  • Outstanding Graduate, University of Science and Technology of China, 2022 and 2025
  • Outstanding Graduate of Anhui Province, 2022
  • Best Student Paper Finalist, CICAI, 2021
  • First-Class Doctoral Scholarship, USTC, 2022–2024

Professional Service

    Program Committee Member / Reviewer:
  • 2026: ICLR, ICML, ACL Rolling Review, AAAI, COLM, AIJ
  • 2025: ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ACL Rolling Review, COLM, AAAI
  • 2024: ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ACL Rolling Review, LREC-COLING, COLM, AAAI
  • 2023: ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, EMNLP, AAAI
  • 2022: ACM Multimedia

Experience

Employment

  • Jun. 2026 – Present, Physical AI Scientist
    Early-stage Physical AI Company
  • Apr. 2025 – Jun. 2026, Algorithm Expert (Alibaba Star, P7)
    Alibaba Group · Alibaba Token Hub

Education

Research Experience

  • May 2024 – Sep. 2024, Research Intern
    Shanghai AI Laboratory — GUI agents and reward models
  • Mar. 2024 – Oct. 2024, Visiting Student
    UNC-Chapel Hill and Stanford IRIS Lab — multimodal reward modeling
  • Feb. 2022 – Nov. 2023, Research Intern
    Tencent AI Lab — federated learning and machine translation
  • Mar. 2021 – Sep. 2021, Research Intern
    Alibaba DAMO Academy — end-to-end speech translation
  • Mar. 2019 – Sep. 2019, Research and Engineering Intern
    Huawei Cloud Speech and Semantics Innovation Lab

Students and Interns

  • Junchao Wu — 1× ACL, 1× EMNLP, 1× NLPCC Shared Task (Organizer)
  • Peng Lai — 1× ICML
  • Zhiwen Ruan — 1× ACL

Papers (Google Scholar Profile)

(Yichao Du is highlighted.)

Preprints
Publications
  • 2026
  • UMEM: Unified Memory Extraction and Management Framework for Generalizable Memory [arxiv]
    Yongshi Ye, Hui Jiang, Feihu Jiang, Tian Lan, Yichao Du, Biao Fu, Xiaodong Shi, Qianghuai Jia, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
    ICML, 2026.
  • UniRRM: Unified Reasoning Reward Models Across Languages and Evaluation Paradigms [openreview]
    Peng Lai, Yichao Du, Junchao Wu, Weibo Gao, Linan Yue, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Derek F. Wong, Guanhua Chen
    ICML, 2026.
  • DetectRL-X: Towards Reliable Multilingual and Real-World LLM-Generated Text Detection
    Junchao Wu, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Hao Zhang, Zeyu Wu, Tianqi Shi, Yichao Du, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Jinsong Su, Derek F. Wong
    ACL, 2026.
  • GIFT: Guided Fine-Tuning and Transfer for Enhancing Instruction-Tuned Language Models
    Zhiwen Ruan, Yichao Du, Jianjie Zheng, Longyue Wang, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Jinsong Su, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
    ACL, 2026.
  • Marco-MoE: Open Multilingual Mixture-of-Expert Language Models with Efficient Upcycling [openreview]
    Fan Jiang, Yu Zhao, Chenyang Lyu, Tianqi Shi, Yichao Du, Feihu Jiang, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
    COLM, 2026.
  • LongSpeech: A Scalable Benchmark for Transcription, Translation and Understanding in Long Speech
    Fei Yang, Xuanfan Ni, Renyi Yang, Jiahui Geng, Qing Li, Chenyang Lyu, Yichao Du, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
    ICASSP, 2026.
  • Precedent Retrieval Based In-Context Learning for Legal Rationale Generation [scholar]
    Linan Yue, Yichao Du, Weibo Gao
    DASFAA, 2026.
  • Overview of NLPCC 2026 Shared Task 6: Ternary Chinese LLM-Generated Text Detection in the Era of Human-Machine Collaboration [openreview]
    Junchao Wu, Zeyu Wu, Runzhe Zhan, Zhiwen Xie, Yulin Yuan, Yichao Du, Longyue Wang, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Derek F. Wong
    NLPCC, 2026.
  • 2025
  • MJ-Bench: Is Your Multimodal Reward Model Really a Good Judge for Text-to-Image Generation? [project]
    Yichao Du*, Zhaorun Chen*, Zichen Wen*, Yiyang Zhou*, Chenhang Cui, Zhenzhen Weng, Haoqin Tu, Chaoqi Wang, Zhengwei Tong, Qinglan Huang, Canyu Chen, Qinghao Ye, Zhihong Zhu, Yuqing Zhang, Jiawei Zhou, Zhuokai Zhao, Rafael Rafailov, Chelsea Finn, Huaxiu Yao
    NeurIPS, 2025.
    * Core contributors.
  • Towards Reliable and Faithful Explanations: A Disentanglement-Augmented Approach for Selective Rationalization
    Linan Yue, Qi Liu, Yichao Du, Li Wang, Yanqing An, Enhong Chen
    IEEE TPAMI, 2025.
  • 2024
  • Federated Self-Explaining GNNs with Anti-shortcut Augmentations
    Linan Yue, Qi Liu, Weibo Gao, Ye Liu, Kai Zhang, Yichao Du, Li Wang, Fangzhou Yao
    ICML, 2024.
  • Towards Faithful Explanations: Boosting Rationalization with Shortcuts Discovery
    Linan Yue, Qi Liu, Yichao Du, Li Wang, Weibo Gao, Yanqing An
    ICLR, 2024.
  • Lost in the Source Language: How Large Language Models Evaluate the Quality of Machine Translation
    Xu Huang, Zhirui Zhang, Xiang Geng, Yichao Du, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang
    ACL, 2024.
  • Datastore Distillation for Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
    Yuhan Dai, Zhirui Zhang, Yichao Du, Shengcai Liu, Lemao Liu, Tong Xu
    IEEE/ACM TASLP, 2024.
  • Communication-Efficient Personalized Federated Learning for Speech-to-Text Tasks
    Yichao Du, Zhirui Zhang, Linan Yue, Xu Huang, Yuqing Zhang, Tong Xu, Linli Xu, Enhong Chen
    ICASSP, 2024.
  • FedJudge: Federated Legal Large Language Model
    Linan Yue, Qi Liu, Yichao Du, Weibo Gao, Ye Liu, Fangzhou Yao
    DASFAA, 2024.
  • 2023
  • Simple and Scalable Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
    Yuhan Dai, Zhirui Zhang, Qiuzhi Liu, Qu Cui, Weihua Li, Yichao Du, Tong Xu
    ICLR, 2023.
  • Federated Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation
    Yichao Du, Zhirui Zhang, Bingzhe Wu, Lemao Liu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen
    ICLR, 2023.
  • Interventional Rationalization
    Linan Yue, Qi Liu, Li Wang, Yanqing An, Yichao Du, Zhenya Huang
    EMNLP, 2023.
  • Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation Is Meta-Optimizer on Output Projection Layer
    Ruize Gao, Zhirui Zhang, Yichao Du, Lemao Liu, Rui Wang
    EMNLP, 2023.
  • The MineTrans Systems for IWSLT 2023 Offline Speech Translation and Speech-to-Speech Translation Tasks
    Yichao Du, Zhengsheng Guo, Jinchuan Tian, Zhirui Zhang, Xing Wang, Jianwei Yu, Zhaopeng Tu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen
    IWSLT, 2023.
    1st place, End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Translation Track
  • 2022
  • DARE: Disentanglement-Augmented Rationale Extraction
    Linan Yue, Qi Liu, Yichao Du, Yanqing An, Li Wang, Enhong Chen
    NeurIPS, 2022.
    Spotlight
  • Non-Parametric Domain Adaptation for End-to-End Speech Translation
    Yichao Du, Weizhi Wang, Zhirui Zhang, Boxing Chen, Tong Xu, Jun Xie, Enhong Chen
    EMNLP, 2022.
    Oral · Average score: 4.5/5 · Top 0.5%
  • Regularizing End-to-End Speech Translation with Triangular Decomposition Agreement
    Yichao Du, Zhirui Zhang, Weizhi Wang, Boxing Chen, Jun Xie, Tong Xu
    AAAI, 2022.
  • 2021
  • Rethinking Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation: From a Perspective of Latent Variables
    Weizhi Wang, Zhirui Zhang, Yichao Du, Boxing Chen, Jun Xie, Weihua Luo
    EMNLP, 2021.
  • Inheritance-Guided Hierarchical Assignment for Clinical Automatic Diagnosis
    Yichao Du, Pengfei Luo, Xudong Hong, Tong Xu, Zhe Zhang, Chao Ren, Yi Zheng, Enhong Chen
    DASFAA, 2021.
    Oral
  • Knowledge Powered Cooperative Semantic Fusion for Patent Classification
    Zhe Zhang, Tong Xu, Le Zhang, Yichao Du, Hui Xiong, Enhong Chen
    CICAI, 2021.
    Best Student Paper Finalist
  • 2020
  • An Automatic ICD Coding Method for Clinical Records Based on Deep Neural Network
    Yichao Du, Tong Xu, Jianhui Ma, Enhong Chen, Yi Zheng, Tongzhu Liu, Guixian Tong
    Big Data Research, 2020.
  • LBBESA: An Efficient Software-Defined Networking Load-Balancing Scheme Based on Elevator Scheduling Algorithm
    Qiliang Li, Jie Cui, Hong Zhong, Yichao Du, Yonglong Luo, Lu Liu
    Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2020.