On March 29, Prof. Yaodong YANG, Director of the Peking University–PsiBot Joint Lab, was named to the “AI100 Young Pioneers” list, jointly released by DeepTech and the MIT Technology Review China.
The AI100 Young Pioneers list aims to identify and recognize Chinese scientists and engineers under 35 who are making globally influential contributions to fundamental AI research and engineering innovation. Prof. Yaodong YANG’s inclusion is not only a recognition of his work in reinforcement learning and embodied intelligence, but also a testament to PsiBot’s outstanding contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.
As a leading company in China’s embodied AI sector, PsiBot is working alongside top-tier partners to rapidly advance the commercialization of embodied intelligence technologies—pushing the field into a new era of real-world impact and scalable deployment.
Prof. Yaodong YANG is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Peking University, Executive Director of the Center for AI Safety and Governance, and Principal Investigator of the Zhiyuan Foundation Model Safety Initiative. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China, and earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Imperial College London and University College London, respectively. He previously served as an Assistant Professor at King’s College London.
Dr. Yang’s research focuses on safe agent interaction and value alignment, with contributions spanning reinforcement learning, AI alignment, and embodied intelligence. He is the creator of several widely used RL toolkits, including HARL, MARLlib, MAlib, TorchOpt, and Omnisafe. He has published over 100 papers in top-tier AI conferences and journals, with more than 8,000 citations on Google Scholar, and since 2022 has ranked second among all Peking University AI scholars in the CSRanking publication count.
His accolades include: – Finalist for Best Paper Award at ICCV 2023 – Best System Paper Award at CoRL 2020 – Most Visionary Paper Award at AAMAS 2021 – Champion of the NeurIPS 2022 Embodied Dexterous Manipulation Challenge He also led the first Chinese team to publish a multi-agent RL algorithm in Nature Machine Intelligence.
Dr. Yang has played a key role in the alignment of major foundation models, including Baichuan2, Pengcheng MindOcean 33B, and HKGAI. His work on carbon material foundation models has been published in Matter, a sub-journal of Cell.
He currently serves as Area Chair for ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS, and IROS, and is an Executive Editor for Neural Networks and Transactions on Machine Learning Research.
About “AI100 Young Pioneers”
Since 2022, MIT Technology Review has annually released its AI trend forecast, What’s Next for AI, mapping out the most cutting-edge directions in artificial intelligence—ranging from embodied intelligence and reasoning-capable large language models, to generative virtual worlds, AI agents, and AI-powered scientific discovery. Notably, young Chinese talent is emerging as a driving force behind many of these global trends.
Across the world’s leading AI research teams, Chinese scientists and engineers are playing pivotal roles. Whether it’s generative AI breakthroughs at OpenAI, protein structure prediction innovations at DeepMind, or technical advances in adversarial robustness and mathematical reasoning at xAI, Chinese researchers appear repeatedly at the core of these accomplishments—highlighting their global influence in both the theoretical and applied foundations of AI.
Against this backdrop, DeepTech and MIT Technology Review China have partnered to launch the “AI100 Young Pioneers” list. Through a multidimensional evaluation method that integrates talent, technology, and industry, candidates are nominated by field experts and reviewed by a panel of advisory judges. The selection process considers multiple dimensions including technological innovation, commercialization impact, cross-disciplinary exploration, industry leadership, and social responsibility.
The final list showcases outstanding individuals under the age of 40 who are making significant contributions to China’s AI landscape—offering a global view of the strength and momentum behind the next generation of Chinese AI leaders.
The full list of AI100 Young Pioneers follows (in alphabetical order by surname/pinyin):
