No. 01 · Personal
AMSTERDAM · 2026
Independent AI Researcher Amsterdam
Seeking PhD positions my contact infoWorld models · LLMs · vision · medical AI · safety
The limits of languagemean the limits of the world? Perhaps, yet we dwellin more than we can name.
§00 · Currently
Built across LLMs, vision, world models, and clinical AI. Now I want a PhD with room for deeper work.
I've shipped research with Tencent, Gradient Networks, MeetaVista, TU Delft, McGill, Tsinghua, and IMDEA. Next I want long-horizon work on 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 at IMDEA Networks (Madrid), AI Research Engineer at TU Delft Imaging Physics, and an MSc in Computer & Embedded Systems Engineering at TU Delft.
Email tonyyunyang@outlook.com
Two things drive this work: pushing AI beyond text into perception and action, and making those systems fairer and more reachable in practice.
Systems that perceive a scene and imagine what happens next. The bridge from describing the world to acting in it.
Making capable models cheap, dependable, and useful enough to actually deploy. Routing, optimization, and agent design.
Vision as a channel for human signal, not just object detection. Reading emotion, intent, and attention from what people see.
Models that work in the real clinic, not only on the leaderboard. Smaller, faster, and fair across patient populations.
Building things that behave reliably when they leave the lab. Robustness, evaluation, and the unglamorous work of trust.
A motivation, not a sub-field. Anything I build should reach the people who need it most, not the people who already have everything.
§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.
★ IMWUT / UBICOMP · 2025
First large-scale public eye-tracking dataset for VR emotion recognition, with high-frame-rate periocular video plus 240 Hz gaze, across seven discrete emotions.
MICCAI · + IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING · 2025
A physics-driven framework that estimates tissue properties from annotated cardiac MRI via diffusion models, enabling zero-shot segmentation across unseen MRI sequences.
MIDL · 2025
Trained nnU-Net models contain substantial weight redundancy. Over 80% of weights can be removed by simple magnitude pruning while preserving segmentation quality.
§02 · Projects
Where the research meets real systems. Each one is a live collaboration with an actual partner (Gradient Networks, Tencent, MeetaVista). Most are still in motion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
§04 · News
§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.
Seeking PhD positions · ready any time
Independent AI Researcher
World models · LLMs · vision · medical AI · safety
signed · T.
