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No. 01 · Personal

AMSTERDAM · 2026

Tony Yang

Independent AI Researcher Amsterdam

Open to research academia or industry

World models · LLMs · vision · medical AI · on‑device AI

The limits of languagemean the limits of the world? Perhaps, yet we dwellin more than we can name.
scroll for the work

§00 · Currently

Portrait of Tony Yang

Built across LLMs, vision, world models, and medical AI. Now I want to go deeper, with passion and faith.

I've shipped research with Tencent, Gradient Networks, MeetaVista, TU Delft, McGill, Tsinghua, and IMDEA. The throughline I care about: useful, durable AI, especially where access and reliability matter.

Day-to-day

An independent AI researcher in Amsterdam. I currently collaborate with industry (Tencent, Gradient Networks, MeetaVista) and academia (TU Delft, McGill, Tsinghua) on cost-efficient large language models, optimization-as-reasoning, and intent-aware world models. Earlier roles include Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, AI Research Engineer at TU Delft Imaging Physics, and an MSc degree from TU Delft.

A research compass

Two things drive this work: pushing AI beyond text into perception and action, and making those systems fairer and more reachable in practice.

§01 · Research

What runs through every paper here. I want this work to be useful where it matters, accessible to people who don't already have it, and meaningful enough to keep at for years.

§02 · Projects

Where the research meets real systems. Some are live collaborations (Gradient Networks, Tencent, MeetaVista); others I build on my own time. Most are still in motion.

2026 → PRESENT · IN PROGRESS · SELF-DRIVEN

Polymarket Decoder

Mining Polymarket's order books to study how prediction markets price news in real time. Looking at when crowds get it right, when they get blindsided, and what the order-book dynamics reveal about collective belief.

2026 · SHIPPED

ScholarHighlights

A browser extension that surfaces venue-quality badges, author-role signals, and flexible ranking data directly on Google Scholar. The information you wish was there at a glance.

GRADIENT NETWORKS · FEB 2026 → PRESENT · IN PROGRESS · OPEN BENCHMARK

LLM Router

Built a benchmark for evaluating LLM routing strategies. Showed that routing can preserve same-quality performance while reducing cost by >90% versus calling a single SOTA model for every step.

MAR 2026 → PRESENT · IN PROGRESS · TARGET NEURIPS '25

Cost-Adaptive LLM Routing with Specialist Models

Building on the LLM Router benchmark, using stronger-model trajectories to fine-tune small specialists for repeated workflows. As usage accumulates, small models improve and the system's cost falls.

MEETAVISTA · MAR 2026 → PRESENT · IN PROGRESS · TARGET TOP-TIER AI VENUE

Human Intent World Model

A vision-language world model that infers customer intent from visual cues and responds with sales-relevant reasoning, fine-tuned on a synthetic dataset distilled from classical sales literature.

TENCENT · APR 2026 → PRESENT · IN PROGRESS · TARGET TOP-TIER AI VENUE

LLM for Optimization

A framework that uses an optimization harness (structured search, feedback, memory retrieval) to guide LLMs toward better solutions on optimization problems like TSP, rather than relying on direct generation alone.

§03 · Writing

Notes on research, taste, and the boring parts of building AI.

First entry coming soon.

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§04 · News

  • [2026/05] Concluded my Marie Curie Fellowship at IMDEA Networks. Now open to research, academia or industry.
  • [2026/03] Submitted a paper on a diffusion-based training framework for large language models to ACL Rolling Review.
  • [2025/10] Began Marie Curie Fellowship at IMDEA Networks (MSCA 6th Sense project).
  • [2025/07] Through the Eyes of Emotion accepted to Ubicomp / IMWUT 2025.
  • [2025/06] Reverse Imaging accepted to MICCAI 2025 + IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.
  • [2025/05] Pruning nnU-Net with Minimal Performance Loss accepted to MIDL 2025.

§05 · Teaching

§06 · Contact

I read everything. Reach out about research, collaboration, supervision, or just to say hi. I answer faster than is professional, and I bring my whole self to the conversation.

Open to research academia or industry

Tony Yang 杨童耘

Independent AI Researcher

World models · LLMs · vision · medical AI · on‑device AI

based in

  • Amsterdam (current)
  • Shanghai
  • Shenzhen

languages

  • Mandarin native
  • English near-native, professional raised in English-speaking environments · IELTS 8.0

signed · T.

step inside the studio