Yaoyao Liu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also affiliated with the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science (formerly the Department of Computer Science), the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and the Illinois Informatics Institute. His research lies at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning, with a particular focus on developing continual and data-efficient intelligent visual systems. His research interests include continual learning, few-shot learning, semi-supervised learning, generative models, 3D geometry modeling, and medical imaging. He is a recipient of the ECVA PhD Award, was recognized as a Top Area Chair at NeurIPS 2025, and was selected for the AAAI-26 New Faculty Highlights Program.
Prior to joining Illinois, Yaoyao was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computational Cognition, Vision, and Learning (CCVL) Group at Johns Hopkins University, working with Prof. Alan L. Yuille. He finished his Ph.D. in Computer Science in the Department of Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where he was advised by Prof. Bernt Schiele and Prof. Qianru Sun. As part of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Ph.D. Program, he was co-supervised by Prof. Christian Rupprecht and Prof. Andrea Vedaldi in the Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at the University of Oxford. He obtained his B.S. in Electronic Information Engineering from Tianjin University. He was also a Research Intern in the NExT Research Centre at the National University of Singapore, working with Prof. Tat-Seng Chua and Prof. Qianru Sun.