Eric Xiang Gao 高翔

About Me

I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Francis Y. Yan.

I completed my undergraduate studies in Computer Science at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS, Yao Class) at Tsinghua University in June 2026. My undergraduate major GPA was 3.8/4.0.

My current research explores whether reinforcement learning can rediscover effective heuristics for networked systems, with a focus on understanding learned policies and diagnosing why training succeeds or fails. My previous work spans multi-agent reinforcement learning, vision-language models, and game theory.

Research Interests

• Reinforcement learning for systems and networking
• Agentic AI for systems
• Systems for agentic AI

Publications & Preprints

1. Rediscovering Heuristics: A Litmus Test for RL in Networked Systems

   Seoyul Oh, Yikai Zheng, Eric Xiang Gao, Deepak Vasisht, and Francis Y. Yan

   ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), 2026

2. Global Convergence of Four-Layer Matrix Factorization under Random Gaussian Initialization

   Minrui Luo, Weihang Xu, Xiang Gao, Maryam Fazel, and Simon Shaolei Du

   Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026

3. Entropic Risk-Sensitive Evolutionary Learning and Equilibrium Selection in Coordination Games

   Solaleh Mohammadi, Xiang Gao, and Kaiqing Zhang

   IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2026

4. Highlighting What Matters: Promptable Embeddings for Attribute-Focused Image Retrieval

   Siting Li, Xiang Gao, and Simon Du

   Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

5. PreACT: Pre-Action Communication of Tentatives for Multi-Agent Coordination and Learning

   Jiaxuan Jiang, Xiang Gao, and Zhixuan Fang

   Preprint, 2025

Contact

The best way to reach me is by email at xiangg6@illinois.edu.

Download my CV (PDF)