Yuanzhang Xiao

AI, decision, and discovery

prof_pic.jpg

I am an associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. I am affiliated with Hawaiʻi Advanced Wireless Technologies Institute and Electrical and Computer Engineering.

I was trained to rigorously solve multi-agent decision-making problems, drawing tools from operations research (optimization, dynamic programming), economics (game theory), and reinforcement learning. Recently, I’ve been teaching LLMs to autoformulate and solve these problems, from optimization, to Markov decision processes, to dynamical systems for scientific discovery. I’m now exploring how to build more autonomous, principled AI agents and agent networks.

selected publications

  1. ICLR
    Operator Theory-Driven Autoformulation of MDPs for Control of Queueing Systems
    Victor Baillet, Yuanzhang Xiao, Nicolás Astorga, and Mihaela Schaar
    In The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026
  2. ICML
    Autoformulation of Mathematical Optimization Models Using LLMs
    Nicolás Astorga, Tennison Liu, Yuanzhang Xiao, and Mihaela Schaar
    In Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025