My name is Yixin (Elaine) Wan and I am a final-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at UCLA. I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Kai-Wei Chang and be a member of the UCLANLP research group. I completed my B.S. in Applied Mathematics (double major in Economics) also at UCLA. Go Bruins!

I build and improve multimodal LLMs and tool-augmented agentic systems through mid- and post-training, large-scale synthetic data construction, workflow / harness design, and rigorous evaluation on novel tasks. I study general multimodal capabilities, controllability, and trustworthiness, with an emphasis on diagnosing new model failure modes, then use both training- and inference-time methods to improve models based on insights.

I have joined FAIR @Meta Superintelligence Labs as a Research Scientist Intern in June 2026 in Menlo Park, CA, working on multi-task large-scale MLLM joint mid-training. Previously, I have interned at Tencent Hunyuan, Amazon AGI, and Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA).

I am actively looking for full-time opportunities starting EOY 2026 or 2027 spring. Feel free to reach out!

News

• [2026/09] 📢 🤔 New Work: How well can SOTA Multimodal LLM recognize fine-grained visual differences in two images? Introducing VDiff-Bench: A Challenging Benchmark for Fine-Grained Image Difference Identification! Check it out: Paper link . Also see our Project Page!
• [2026/07] I served as a Program Chair for the second time at the ACL 2026 TrustNLP Workshop. Grateful for all the support!
• [2026/07] I gave a talk on Reflective & Bias-Aware Knowledge Control at the ACL 2026 Tutorial: Knowledge Control for Responsible Generative AI, where I highlight agentic mitigation and our related recent work as a promising research direction in trustworthy AI.
• [2026/06] I joined FAIR @Meta Superintelligence Labs as a Research Scientist Intern at Menlo Park, CA. I will be working on multi-task Multimodal LLM mid-training. Excited to explore the Bay!
• [2026/04] 2 papers accepted to ACL 2026 Main conference and 1 accepted to Findings 🎉! More details coming soon. See you in San Diego 😊
• [2026/02] MotionEdit is accepted to CVPR 2026 🎉! See you in Denver 😄
• [2025/12] 📢 ⭐️ New Work on Motion Image Editing with Tencent Hunyuan released! Check it out: MotionEdit: Benchmarking and Learning Motion-Centric Image Editing . Also check out more demos on our Project Page!
• [2025/09] I am humbled to be awarded the 2025 Amazon AI Fellowship 🎉!
• [2025/08] 3 papers on LLM Unlearning and Fairness accepted to EMNLP 2025 Findings 🎉! Check them out:
  • Not Every Token Needs Forgetting: Selective Unlearning to Limit Change in Utility in Large Language Model Unlearning
  • LUME: LLM Unlearning with Multitask Evaluations
  • Fact-or-Fair: A Checklist for Behavioral Testing of AI Models on Fairness-Related Queries
• [2025/06] Started my internship at Tencent Hunyuan (Bellevue)!
• [2025/05] 2 long papers on Fairness accepted to ACL 2025 Main 🎉! Check them out:
  • The Male CEO and the Female Assistant: Evaluation and Mitigation of Gender Biases in Text-To-Image Generation of Dual Subjects
  • White Men Lead, Black Women Help? Benchmarking and Mitigating Language Agency Social Biases in LLMs
• [2025/05] Arrived at Albuquerque! I am serving as the Program Chair at NAACL 2025’s Trustworthy NLP (TrustNLP) Workshop.
  • I am also presenting my recent work on LLM unlearning with Amazon: Not Every Token Needs Forgetting: Selective Unlearning to Limit Change in Utility in Large Language Model Unlearning