I am an Assistant Professor in the UCL Computer Science department, where I co-lead UCL NLP group. I had my PhD at UCL NLP, co-supervised by Prof. Pontus Stenetorp and Prof. Sebastian Riedel. I was affiliated with Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithm (MILA), and Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII).

My primary research interest is Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Selected Publications

Please check the full list of my publications here.

Multilingual Language Model Pretraining using Machine-translated Data
Jiayi Wang*, Yao Lu*, Maurice Weber, Max Ryabinin, David Adelani, Yihong Chen, Raphael Tang, Pontus Stenetorp (equal contribution)
EMNLP 2025

Words Worth a Thousand Pictures: Measuring and Understanding Perceptual Variability in Text-to-Image Generation
Raphael Tang, Crystina Zhang, Lixinyu Xu, Yao Lu, Wenyan Li, Pontus Stenetorp, Jimmy Lin, Ferhan Ture
EMNLP 2024 (Outstanding Paper Award, 0.4% out of 6000+ submissions)

Strings from the Library of Babel: Random Sampling as a Strong Baseline for Prompt Optimisation
Yao Lu, Jiayi Wang, Raphael Tang, Sebastian Riedel and Pontus Stenetorp
NAACL 2024

Fantastically Ordered Prompts and Where to Find Them: Overcoming Few-Shot Prompt Order Sensitivity
Yao Lu, Max Bartolo, Alastair Moore, Sebastian Riedel and Pontus Stenetorp
ACL 2022 (Outstanding Paper Award, 0.2% out of 3000+ submissions)

Experiences