Portrait of Fan Yao

Fan Yao

Assistant ProfessorUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In the US
I am an assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research (STOR) at UNC Chapel Hill. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, advised by Haifeng Xu and Hongning Wang. Prior to obtaining my PhD, I spent two years at the University of Chicago and received both my BS and MS in Computational Mathematics from Peking University.

Research interests

  • Social and economic aspects of AI
  • Human-centered ML/AI
  • Strategic and multi-agent systems
  • Recommender systems
  • Digital platform economy

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Research Research navigator A reading route through my papers, from your question. Teaching Learning challenges Predict, experiment, and reflect on two course ideas. Prospective students Research conversation For prospective students: turn an interest into a paper, an exercise, and a question. Beyond research Curiosity notebook Threads between the kitchen, the court, and places.

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Research

I study the algorithmic interplay between human behavior and ML/AI systems. Three questions run through my work.

  1. Creators & AI

    How should platforms and AI systems reward the people who create content?

  2. Strategic learning

    What happens when learning algorithms meet strategic people and agents?

  3. Alignment & trust

    How do training choices shape LLM alignment, and how can deployed models be protected?

Drawing onAlgorithmic game theoryOnline & reinforcement learningDynamical systemsLearning theory

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Selected Publications

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Full list on Google Scholar

News

  1. Three papers accepted at NeurIPS, ICML, and EC 2026.
  2. Received an award from the UNC AI Acceleration Program.
  3. Invited talk on LLM alignment dynamics at the LLMs and Strategic Agents for Machine Learning workshop, Northwestern University.
  4. Invited talk on LLM alignment dynamics at the FTEC Seminar, HKUST (Guangzhou), online.
  5. Co-hosted the INFORMS session Preference Learning in Large Language Models with Chong Liu and gave the talk “Rethinking the role of GenAI in content creation ecosystem,” Atlanta.
Earlier news
  1. Invited panelist at the Aligning AI with Society workshop, UNC.
  2. Joined STOR at UNC Chapel Hill as a tenure-track assistant professor.

Teaching

I teach machine learning through its mathematics and its consequences for people and society, connecting theory with code, discussion, and projects.

Fall 2026 · UNC Chapel Hill

STOR 565 Machine Learning A mathematical introduction to learning from data: loss, optimization, generalization, and implementation. Advanced undergrad & MSPython experiments Course website STOR 323I Machine Learning: Ethics and Society Fairness, privacy, strategic behavior, and generative AI, through technical and philosophical lenses. UndergraduateDiscussion & case studies Course website

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Beyond Research

Tennis, cooking, music, two cats, and a few places I have called home.

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