Hi, I'm

Tiankai (Raymond) Yang

Iโ€™m a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Yue Zhao in the FORTIS Lab. I earned an MS in Machine Learning & Data Science from USC and a BE in Software Engineering from Nankai University.

My research focuses on the Trustworthiness of Large Language Models and Agents. Specifically:

  • Post-training Alignment for Trustworthy LLMs โ€” Safety Alignment, Preference Learning
  • Robust and Reliable LLM Inference โ€” Hallucination mitigation, Jailbreak / OOD Detection, Multimodal Robustness, Model Selection & Routing
  • Trustworthy LLM Agents and Agentic Systems โ€” Agent Safety, Runtime Reliability, Multi-Agent Orchestration

I will join LinkedIn as an AI/ML Engineer Intern (Generative AI) in May 2026 in Sunnyvale!

News

  • May 2026 ๐Ÿ† AwardCoAct: Co-Active LLM Preference Learning with Human-AI Synergy selected for an Oral presentation at ACL 2026.
  • Apr 2026 ๐Ÿ“ PreprintCat-DPO: Category-Adaptive Safety Alignment is now on arXiv.
  • Apr 2026 ๐Ÿ“ PreprintNo Attacker Needed: Unintentional Cross-User Contamination in Shared-State LLM Agents is now on arXiv.
  • Feb 2026 ๐Ÿ’ผ InternshipI will join LinkedIn as an AI/ML Engineer Intern, Generative AI this summer. See you in Sunnyvale!
  • Jan 2026 ๐ŸŽ‰ AcceptedCoAct: Co-Active LLM Preference Learning with Human-AI Synergy accepted to ACL 2026. arXiv.