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 Programs. 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, the CVPR 2026 Outstanding Area Chair Award, and the NeurIPS 2025 Top Area Chair Award. He was also selected for the AAAI-26 New Faculty Highlights Program, the CVPR 2023 Doctoral Consortium, and the WACV 2024 Doctoral Consortium.
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 received his Ph.D. in Computer Science, summa cum laude, 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, where he worked with Prof. Yuting Su and Prof. An-An Liu. 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.