Bio

I’m a final-year PhD student at the Computational and Biological Learning Lab (CBL) at Cambridge, supervised by Adrian Weller, and a research intern at Basis.

I received an MSc in Advanced Computer Science from Oxford and a BSc in AI from Edinburgh, where I graduated first in my cohort.

Interests

I am broadly interested in driving substantial advancements in humanity’s development. To this end, I pursue the complementary goals of understanding and developing generalist agents, drawing on diverse traditions in AI research, including formal languages, probabilistic modeling, machine learning, and planning.

Beyond this, I like to seek truth and beauty as they are found in nature, maths, and arts.

Selected Publications

ICLR 2026(Top 1.9%)
ExoPredicator: Learning Abstract Models of Dynamic Worlds for Robot Planning [Code] [Blog]
Yichao Liang, Dat Nguyen, Cambridge Yang, Tianyang Li, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Carl Edward Rasmussen, Adrian Weller, Zenna Tavares, Tom Silver*, Kevin Ellis*
RA-L 2026
From Pixels to Predicates: Learning Symbolic World Models via Pretrained Vision-Language Models [Code] [Page]
Ashay Athalye*, Nishanth Kumar*, Tom Silver, Yichao Liang, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
NeurIPS 2025Spotlight
PoE-World: Compositional World Modeling with Products of Programmatic Experts [Code] [Page]
Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Yichao Liang, Hao Tang, Adrian Weller, Marta Kryven, Kevin Ellis
ICLR 2025Spotlight
VisualPredicator: Learning Abstract World Models with Neuro-Symbolic Predicates for Robot Planning [Code]
Yichao Liang, Nishanth Kumar, Hao Tang, Adrian Weller, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tom Silver, João F. Henriques, Kevin Ellis
CVPR 2024
Rapid Motor Adaptation for Robotic Manipulator Arms [Code]
Yichao Liang, Kevin Ellis, João F. Henriques
NeurIPS 2022
Drawing out of Distribution with Neuro-Symbolic Generative Models [Code]
Yichao Liang, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tuan Anh Le*, N. Siddharth*

Recent Collaborators