Wenlin Yao
Principal Researcher at Microsoft
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolWenlin Yao is a Principal Researcher specializing in advancing large language models through reinforcement learning and agentic frameworks, with nine years of experience bridging research and production. He has led work on agentic LLMs for strategic reasoning, tool use, and environment interaction at Tencent AI Lab and built end-to-end RL systems for Amazon’s Rufus to improve planning and multi-step problem solving. Now at Microsoft Research, he focuses on translating frontier RL and agent design into robust, interpretable systems that mitigate hallucination and enable self-evolving behaviors. His PhD from Texas A&M underpins a strong theoretical foundation, while internships at BBN and Amazon reflect early hands-on applied research. Wenlin combines deep academic rigor with a track record of shipping scalable AI features in industry, often turning complex RL objectives into practical reward designs and production workflows. Based in Bellevue, WA, he is known for making subtle but impactful improvements in agent reliability and real-world tool integration.
9 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Texas A&M UniversityBachelor's degree Software Engineering, Bachelor's degree Software Engineering at Dalian University of Technology
Stackoverflow
31reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (42)
visual-question-answering9
computer-vision8
arxiv8
zero-shot-classification8
clip8
pytorch7
wiktionary7
dictionary7
code-generation7
deep-learning7
extractor7
proximal-policy-optimization7
transparency6
file-parser6
pdf6
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (5)
wenlinyao/EMNLP20-SubeventAcquisition
Sep 2020 - Dec 2020
Contributions:9 commits, 7 pushes, 1 branch in 2 months
wenlinyao/wenlinyao.github.io
Nov 2020 - Oct 2024
Github Pages template for academic personal websites, forked from mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
Contributions:43 pushes in 3 years 11 months
templategithub-pages-templatemmistakesmistakesjekyll
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