I am a PhD student 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).

I will join the UCL Computer Science department as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025 and co-lead the UCL NLP group.

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