About Me

Weikai Yang (杨维铠) is an Assistant Professor at the Data Science and Analytics Thrust (DSA), and jointly appointed at the Computational Media and Arts Thrust (CMA) in Information Hub, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). He received my Ph.D. degree in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2024, under the supervision of Prof. Shixia Liu.

He directs the Visual Interactive Collaborative Lab VICA-LAB @ HKUST(GZ). The research explores how visual representations, interactive systems, and collaborative human–AI can work together to improve the quality, interpretability, and usability of modern data and machine learning pipelines. We aim to empower users, especially those without deep ML expertise, to understand large-scale data, diagnose and enhance model behavior, and iteratively steer learning processes with their domain knowledge.
Current research directions include VIS4AI (data quality improvement, explainable machine learning) and AI4VIS (intelligent visual analytics, visualization techniques).

He is actively seeking self-motivated Ph.D. students, mphil students, and RAs (Click Here!). If you are interested in working with me, please send an email with your CV and transcripts for all degrees. You may consider taking a look at our spotlight paper Foundation Models Meet Visualizations: Challenges and Opportunities, which covers many future research directions I would like to explore.

Publications

(♯ = corresponding author; * = equal contribution; my students are underlined)

RefAdGen: High-Fidelity Advertising Image Generation

Yiyun Chen; Weikai Yang♯.

AAAIAAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Oral). 2026


DeepVIS: Bridging Natural Language and Data Visualization Through Step-wise Reasoning

Zhihao Shuai; Boyan Li; Siyu Yan; Yuyu Luo; Weikai Yang♯.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2026


Fast Wrong-way Cycling Detection in CCTV Videos: Sparse Sampling is All You Need

Jing Xu*; Wentao Shi*; Sheng Ren; Lijuan Zhang; Weikai Yang♯; Pan Gao♯; Jie Qin.

TITSIEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Transactions. 2026


BiasField: Interactive Bias Probing of Machine Learning Datasets

Zhen Li; Weikai Yang; Xinhuan Shu; Jiangning Zhu; Hui Zhang; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2026


NCP: Neighborhood-Preserving Non-Uniform Circle Packing Method for Visualization

Duan Li; Jun Yuan; Xinyuan Guo; Xiting Wang; Yang Liu; Weikai Yang♯; Shixia Liu.

CVMComputational Visual Media. 2025


Visualization for Artificial Intelligence

Shixia Liu♯; Weikai Yang♯; Junpeng Wang; Jun Yuan.

SpringerSynthesis Lectures on Visualization.

bib

Hierarchical Fuzzy-Cluster-Aware Grid Layout for Large-Scale Data

Yuxing Zhou; Changjian Chen; Zhiyang Shen; Jiangning Zhu; Jiashu Chen; Weikai Yang; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2025


Structural-Entropy-Based Sample Selection for Efficient and Effective Learning

Tianchi Xie; Jiangning Zhu; Guozu Ma; Minzhi Lin; Wei Chen; Weikai Yang♯; Shixia Liu.

ICLRInternational Conference on Learning Representations. 2025


RuleExplorer: A Scalable Matrix Visualization for Understanding Tree Ensemble Classifiers

Zhen Li; Weikai Yang*; Jun Yuan; Jing Wu; Changjian Chen; Yao Ming; Fan Yang; Hui Zhang; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2025


Dynamic Color Assignment for Hierarchical Data

Jiashu Chen*; Weikai Yang*; Zelin Jia; Lanxi Xiao; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2025 (Honorable Mention)


Enhancing Single Frame Supervision for Better Temporal Action Localization

Changjian Chen; Jiashu Chen; Weikai Yang; Haoze Wang; Johannes Knittel; Xibin Zhao; Steffen Koch; Thomas Ertl; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2024


Interactive Reweighting for Mitigating Label Quality Issues

Weikai Yang; Yukai Guo; Jing Wu; Zheng Wang; Lan-Zhe Guo; Yu-Feng Li; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2024


Foundation Models Meet Visualizations: Challenges and Opportunities

Weikai Yang; Mengchen Liu; Zheng Wang; Shixia Liu.

CVMComputational Visual Media. 2024 (spotlight paper, honorable mentioned)


Cluster Aware Grid Layout

Yuxing Zhou*; Weikai Yang*; Jiashu Chen; Changjian Chen; Zhiyang Shen; Xiaonan Luo; Lingyun Yu; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2024



A Survey of Visual Analytics Research for Improving Training Data Quality (in Chinese)

Weikai Yang; Changjian Chen; Jiangning Zhu; Lei Li; Peng Liu; Shixia Liu.

JCADCCF Journal of Computer-Aided Design & Computer Graphics. 2023


Diagnosing Ensemble Few-Shot Classifiers

Weikai Yang; Xi Ye; Xingxing Zhang; Lanxi Xiao; Jiazhi Xia; Zhongyuan Wang; Jun Zhu; Hanspeter Pfister; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2022


A Unified Understanding of Deep NLP Models for Text Classification

Zhen Li; Xiting Wang; Weikai Yang; Jing Wu; Zhengyan Zhang; Zhiyuan Liu; Maosong Sun; Hui Zhang; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2022



Interactive Steering of Hierarchical Clustering

Weikai Yang; Xiting Wang; Jie Lu; Wenwen Dou; Shixia Liu.

TVCGIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 2021



Diagnosing Concept Drift with Visual Analytics

Weikai Yang; Zhen Li; Mengchen Liu; Yafeng Lu; Kelei Cao; Ross Maciejewski; Shixia Liu.

VASTIEEE Visualization Conference (VAST). 2020


Why AI Fails: Parallax

Lanxi Xiao; Weikai Yang; Haoze Wang; Shixia Liu; Qiong Wu.

XAIxArtsThe International Workshop on eXplainable AI for the Arts at the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference. 2023


Why AI Fails: Shortcut

Lanxi Xiao; Weikai Yang; Haoze Wang; Shixia Liu; Qiong Wu.

XAIxArtsThe International Workshop on eXplainable AI for the Arts at the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference. 2023


Talks

  • [July. 2024] On Foundation Models Meet Visualization: Challenges and Opportunities @ ChinaVis Link
  • [Apr. 2024] On Data-Centric Visual Analytics for Machine Learning @ HKUST-GZ Link
  • [Nov. 2023] On Sample Representativeness-based Visual Analytics for Analyzing and Improving Model Performance @ The China-R Conference Link Slide Video

Selected Awards

  • 2024 IEEE VIS Honorable Mention award
  • 2024 Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award of Tsinghua University
  • 2024 Outstanding Graduate of Tsinghua University (5%) and Beijing (10%)
  • 2022 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award of Tsinghua University
  • 2019 Outstanding Undergraduate of Tsinghua University (2%) and Beijing (5%)
  • 2017 Qualcomm Scholarship
  • 2017 National Scholarship (1%)

Services

  • PC Member
    • VIS (2025)
    • EuroVIS (2026)
    • IUI (2026)
    • AAAI (2023-2026)
  • Conference Reviewer
    • IEEE VIS (2021-2024)
    • PacificVis (2022-2024)
    • ChinaVis (2020-2023)
    • IUI (2024)
  • Journal Reviewer
    • IEEE TVCG (2022-)
    • Visual Informatics (2022-)
  • Student Volunteer: IEEE VIS (2020, 2022, 2023)
  • Teaching
    • C++ Programming
  • Teaching Assistantships
    • Discrete Mathematics I: Mathematical Logic and Set Theory (Fall, 2019-2024)
    • Discrete Mathematics II: Graph Theory and Abstract Algebra (Spring, 2019-2024)
    • Information Visualization and Visual Analytics (Fall, 2020-2024)

Miscellaneous