Welcome! I am Leyao (Laura) Wang, a MSCS (fully-funded program with thesis) at Yale University co-advised by Prof. Rex Ying and Prof. Arman Cohan. I obtained the Bachelor of Science from Vanderbilt University with summa cum laude (the highest honor), double majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics and minoring in Data Science. In the past, I was fortunate to work with Dr. Tyler Derr in Network Data Science (NDS) Lab at Vanderbilt, Dr. Pranam Chatterjee in The Programmable Biology Group (PBG) at Duke University, and Dr. Zhijun Yin from the Vanderbilt SPHERE lab.

Research Interests

My research interests center on human–AI collaboration, with a focus on aligning and evaluating LLMs and agents across several dimensions:

• AI for Science: Training and benchmarking agents (e.g., deep research agents) for scientific discovery.
• Data-Centric AI: Synthesizing and curating data for LLM/agent post-training (SFT/RL) and evaluation.
• Trustworthy AI: Aligning LLM/ agents with human values for personalizatin or safety.

News

• [01/2026] Our paper “A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation” has been accepted to EACL 2026!
• [11/2025] My paper “SaVe-TAG: LLM-based Interpolation for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs” has been accepted to KDD 2026 and NPGML @ Neurips!
• [11/2025] My paper “MindVote: When AI Meets the Wild West of Social Media Opinion” has been accepted as AAA2025 (Oral)!
• [08/2025] My paper “Towards Bridging Review Sparsity in Recommendation with Textual Edge Graph Representation” has been released on ArXiv!
• [08/2025] My paper “MindVote: When AI Meets the Wild West of Social Media Opinion” has been released on ArXiv!
• [06/2025] Join the Yale NLP Lab co-advised by Prof. Arman Cohan!
• [06/2025] Join the Graph and Geometric Learning Lab co-advised by Prof. Rex Ying!
• [05/2025] My paper “SaVe-TAG: Semantic-aware Vicinal Risk Minimization for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs” has been released on ArXiv!
• [02/2025] Our survey “Towards Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey” has been released on ArXiv!
• [01/2025] I am selected as an Honorable Mention for the 2024-2025 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award!
• [12/2024] My paper “PepDoRA: A Unified Peptide Language Model via Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation” was presented at NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on AI for New Drug Modalities (AIDrugX @ NeurIPS24)!
• [11/2024] My paper “Applications and Concerns of ChatGPT and Other Conversational Large Language Models in Health Care: Systematic Review” is now published on JMIR!
• [10/2024] My paper “PepDoRA: A Unified Peptide Language Model via Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation” has been accepted by NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on AI for New Drug Modalities (AIDrugX @ NeurIPS24)!
• [10/2024] My paper “Applications and Concerns of ChatGPT and Other Conversational Large Language Models in Healthcare: A Systematic Review” has been accepted by the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR)!
• [09/2024] Our paper “Sensor2Text: Enabling Natural Language Interactions for Daily Activity Tracking Using Wearable Sensors” has been accepted to the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT/UbiComp 2024)!
• [08/2024] My paper “Large Language Model-based Augmentation for Imbalanced Node Classification on Text-Attributed Graphs” has been released to ArXiv!
• [05/2024] Join the Programmable Biology Group (PBG) advised by Dr. Pranam Chatterjee!
• [04/2024] My paper “A Systematic Review of ChatGPT and Other Conversational Large Language Models in Healthcare” has been released on MedRXiv!
• [01/2024] Join Network Data Science (NDS) Lab advised by Dr. Tyler Derr!