Kailai Yang

Kailai Yang

PhD candidate, The University of Manchester.

About me

Hi, I'm Kailai, a final-year Ph.D. candidate (President's doctoral scholar) at The University of Manchester and the NaCTeM group. I'm advised by Prof. Sophia Ananiadou and Prof. Junichi Tsujii.

My reserach mainly lies in natural language processing. I'm now interested in the latest development in large language models. I'm working on aligning LLMs to human preferences and values. I'm also exploring efficient pre-training data mixing methods for foundation models to generally leverage their power. My previous works focus on affective computing and AI for mental health.

I also enjoy the game of basketball, reading, and movies. I'm a huge sci-fi fan. Reach out if you are interested in collaboration or just want to have a nice chat! :)

I expect to graduate in Spring 2026 and am actively seeking full-time opportunities in the AI academia or industry. Please contact me if my background aligns with your interests. My CV is available upon request.


News

  • Oct, 2025 New preprint: "Natural Language Processing Applications in Cardiology: A Narrative Review".
  • Oct, 2025 Selected as top reviewers for NeurIPS 2025!
  • Oct, 2025 Successfully passed my PhD viva!
  • Oct, 2025 Invited to serve on the program committee for ECIR 2026.
  • Sep, 2025 One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
  • Sep, 2025 Invited to serve as an area chair for LREC 2026.
  • Aug, 2025 Our paper: "Selective Preference Optimization via Token-Level Reward Function Estimation" has been accepted by EMNLP 2025 main conference! See you in Suzhou!
  • May, 2025 One paper accepted by ACL 2025.
  • Feb, 2025 Invited to serve on the program committee for SIGIR 2025.
  • Jan, 2025 Our paper: "Fmdllama: Financial misinformation detection based on large language models" accepted as a WWW 2025 short paper.

Selected Professional Services

  • Area Chair
    • LREC’ 26
  • Journal Reviewer
    • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
    • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
    • IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
    • Expert Systems with Applications
    • Information Fusion
    • ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
    • Journal of Biomedical Informatics
    • Neural Networks
    • Artificial Intelligence Review
    • Information Processing & Management
  • Program Committee/Reviewer
    • NeurIPS
    • NAACL
    • EMNLP
    • WWW
    • ACL
    • COLING
    • EACL
    • AAAI
    • SIGIR
    • ECIR