Hello, I'm

Xinyi Gao

Ph.D. Student in Computer Science · UC Santa Barbara

I'm a third-year Ph.D. student at UC Santa Barbara, advised by Prof. Shiyu Chang. I also work closely with Dr. Yang Zhang. My research interests lie in Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models. I build intelligent systems that make AI more trustworthy and more personal.

4 Publications
3 Conference
1 Journal
View Publications Get in Touch
Xinyi Gao

// Publications

Conference

2026

KT4EQG: Personalized Exercise Question Generation via Knowledge Tracing

PDF OpenReview

Xinyi Gao, Qiucheng Wu, Lu Ding, Q.Vera Liao, Kaizhi Qian, Ying Xu, Shiyu Chang, Yang Zhang

Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026

2024

Has It All Been Solved? Open NLP Research Questions Not Solved by Large Language Models

Paper

Oana Ignat*, Zhijing Jin*, Artem Abzaliev, Laura Biester, Santiago Castro, Naihao Deng, Xinyi Gao, Aylin Gunal, Jacky He, Ashkan Kazemi, Muhammad Khalifa, Namho Koh, Andrew Lee, Siyang Liu, Do June Min, Shinka Mori, Joan Nwatu, Veronica Perez-Rosas, Siqi Shen, Zekun Wang, Winston Wu, Rada Mihalcea (* equal contribution)

Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING), 2024

2023

Multi-Turn Dialogue Agent as Sales' Assistant in Telemarketing

Paper

Wanting Gao, Xinyi Gao, Yin Tang

International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2023

Journal

2026

A Hierarchical Probabilistic Framework for Incremental Knowledge Tracing in Classroom Settings

PDF

Xinyi Gao*, Qiucheng Wu*, Yang Zhang*, Xuechen Liu, Kaizhi Qian, Ying Xu, Shiyu Chang (* equal contribution)

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2026

// News

2026.07
"A Hierarchical Probabilistic Framework for Incremental Knowledge Tracing in Classroom Settings" accepted by TMLR.
2026.07
"KT4EQG: Personalized Exercise Question Generation via Knowledge Tracing" accepted to COLM 2026.

// Experience

Education

09/2024 - Present

Ph.D. in Computer Science

University of California, Santa Barbara

09/2022 - 12/2023

M.S. in Data Science

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

09/2017 - 12/2021

B.S. in Data Science, Minor in Mathematics

University of California, Irvine · Phi Beta Kappa

Teaching Experience

10/2024 - Present

Teaching Assistant, Computer Science

UC Santa Barbara

08/2023 - 12/2023

Graduate Student Instructor, Statistics

University of Michigan

Work Experience

06/2026 - 09/2026

Research Intern

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab

// Contact

Feel free to reach out. I'm always happy to chat about research.

xinyigao@ucsb.edu

Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California, USA

GitHub LinkedIn Google Scholar ORCID