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, deep 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
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
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
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
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
Yichao Liang, Kevin Ellis, João F. Henriques