Xinyan Velocity Yu 余忻妍

I am a Research Engineer at Microsoft Office of Applied Research , where I work on collaborative agents and privacy-preserving synthetic data generation.

I am also a Computer Science Ph.D. student on leave at the University of Southern California, advised by Jesse Thomason and Dani Yogatama. At USC, my research has explored how language models retrieve, organize, and transfer knowledge across tasks, languages, and modalities through retrieval augmentation, representation analysis, and rigorous evaluation. I completed my B.S. and M.S. at the University of Washington, where I worked with Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, Akari Asai, Sewon Min, and Jungo Kasai.

I was born and raised in Chongqing, China.

Portrait of Xinyan Velocity Yu

News

Research

My current work focuses on training and evaluating collaborative agents that interact with people, other agents, and their environments. I also build agentic pipelines for synthetic data generation, using reinforcement learning to optimize their behavior while incorporating differential privacy.

More broadly, I study how language models retrieve, organize, and transfer knowledge across tasks, languages, and modalities, with an emphasis on retrieval augmentation, representation analysis, rigorous evaluation, false-premise detection, and document intelligence.

Publications

* denotes equal contribution.

Peer-reviewed

Preprints

2026
MMGR: Multi-Modal Generative Reasoning

Zefan Cai*, Haoyi Qiu*, Tianyi Ma*, Haozhe Zhao*, Gengze Zhou, Tingting Liao, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Shawn Lin, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Minjia Zhang, Wen Xiao, Jiuxiang Gu, Nanyun Peng, Junjie Hu

Preprint, 2026