Yu Su's Homepage - The Ohio State University (original) (raw)

About Me

I'm an Associate Professor and Innovation Scholar at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, where I co-direct the OSU NLP group, co-lead the Foundational AI team in the ICICLE AI Institute and lead the Machine Learning Foundations team in the Imageomics Institute. I got my PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara and my bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University, both in Computer Science. I also spent some fun time as a researcher at Microsoft. I'm a 2025 Sloan Research Fellow and received several best/outstanding paper awards from CVPR and ACL.

I'm broadly interested in artificial intelligence, with a primary interest in the role of language as a vehicle for reasoning and communication. These days, I spend much of my time thinking about language agents [blog, tutorial], an emerging class of AI agents characterized by their language understanding and production capabilities.

I'm fascinated by biological intelligence and the power of natural selection, so one may find many references or direct inspirations from biological intelligence in my work. Meanwhile, biological systems also have their constraints and limitations, and I hope to develop advanced artificial intelligence to augment human intelligence. Some facets and applications of intelligence I'm currently interested in:

• Reasoning and grounding, especially in multimodal contexts [MMMU, SeeAct, Grokked Transformers, Pangu, UGround]
• Planning and world models [LLM-Planner, WebDreamer]
• Memory and non-parametric continual learning [HippoRAG, HippoRAG 2]
• Benchmarking and evaluation [Mind2Web, Mind2Web 2, TravelPlanner]
• AI for sciences [BioCLIP, BioCLIP 2, ScienceAgentBench]

Recent Talks

• Tutorial: Language Agents: Foundations, Prospects, and Risks (slides) (recording)
• On Memory, Reasoning, and Planning of Language Agents (recording)
  Berkeley Advanced LLM Agents MOOC
• A Holistic and Critical Look at Language Agents (slides)
  CMU Agent Workshop, JPMorgan Chase, Amazon AGI, Apple NLU Workshop, LMU Munich/TU Darmstadt, Stanford, Princeton, NVIDIA
• Web Agents: A New Frontier for Embodied Agents (slides)
  University of Michigan, SpLU-RoboNLP Workshop@ACL'24, ServiceNow

Awards & Honors

• NSF CAREER Award, 2025
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, 2025
• Lumley Interdisciplinary Research Award, OSU, 2025
• Faculty Teaching Award, OSU, 2025
• Best Student Paper Award, CVPR, 2024
• Best Paper Finalist, CVPR, 2024
• Cisco Faculty Award, 2024
• Outstanding Area Chair, EMNLP, 2024
• Outstanding Paper Award, ACL, 2023
• Lumley Research Award, OSU, 2023
• Outstanding Paper Award, COLING, 2022
• Distinguished Assistant Professorship of Engineering Inclusive Excellence, OSU, 2022
• Third-Place Honor, Inaugural Amazon Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, 2022
• Outstanding Dissertation Award of Computer Science, UCSB, 2019
• Outstanding Freshman/Graduate Awards, Tsinghua University, 2008/2012

Students

Current Ph.D. / Postdocs

• Shijie Chen (AU21 –, co-advised with Huan Sun)
• Sam Stevens (AU21 –)
• Jiaman (Lisa) Wu (AU22 –, co-advised with Wei-Lun Chao)
• Boyuan Zheng (AU23 – ; on leave for xAI)
• Boyu Gou (AU23 –)
• Yiheng Shu (AU23 –)
• Jianyang Gu (AU24 –, postdoc with Wei-Lun Chao, Tanya Berger-Wolf)
• Jian Xie (AU25 –)
• Zhehao Zhang (AU25 –)

Alumni

• Chan Hee (Luke) Song (Ph.D. 2026, NVIDIA)
• Kai Zhang (Ph.D. 2026, NeoCognition)
• Vardaan Pahuja (Ph.D. 2026, Fujitsu Research of America)
• Yu Gu (Ph.D. 2025, Co-Founder at NeoCognition)
• Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez (Ph.D. 2025, postdoc at JHU)
• Xiang Yue (Ph.D. 2024, Meta Superintelligence Labs)

Publications

Selected recent highlights that reflect my current interests. See Google Scholar for full list. *: Equal Contribution

• Agent Learning via Early Experience
  Kai Zhang, Xiangchao Chen, Bo Liu, Tianci Xue, Zeyi Liao, Zhihan Liu, Xiyao Wang, Yuting Ning, Zhaorun Chen, Xiaohan Fu, Jian Xie, Yuxuan Sun, Boyu Gou, Qi Qi, Zihang Meng, Jianwei Yang, Ning Zhang, Xian Li, Ashish Shah, Dat Huynh, Hengduo Li, Zi Yang, Sara Cao, Lawrence Jang, Shuyan Zhou, Jiacheng Zhu, Huan Sun, Jason Weston, Yu Su, Yifan Wu. [paper]
• Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge
  Boyu Gou*, Zanming Huang*, Yuting Ning*, Yu Gu, Michael Lin, Weijian Qi, Andrei Kopanev, Botao Yu, Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez, Yiheng Shu, Chan Hee Song, Jiaman Wu, Shijie Chen, Hanane Nour Moussa, Tianshu Zhang, Jian Xie, Yifei Li, Tianci Xue, Zeyi Liao, Kai Zhang, Boyuan Zheng, Zhaowei Cai, Viktor Rozgic, Morteza Ziyadi, Huan Sun, Yu Su. In the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025 (NeurIPS'25 D&B) [paper] [project]
• BioCLIP 2: Emergent Properties from Scaling Hierarchical Contrastive Learning
  Jianyang Gu, Samuel Stevens, Elizabeth G Campolongo, Matthew J Thompson, Net Zhang, Jiaman Wu, Andrei Kopanev, Zheda Mai, Alexander E. White, James Balhoff, Wasila Dahdul, Daniel Rubenstein, Hilmar Lapp, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Wei-Lun Chao, Yu Su. In the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025 (NeurIPS'25 Spotlight) [paper] [project]
• Is Your LLM Secretly a World Model of the Internet? Model-Based Planning for Web Agents
  Yu Gu*, Kai Zhang*, Yuting Ning*, Boyuan Zheng*, Boyu Gou, Tianci Xue, Cheng Chang, Sanjari Srivastava, Yanan Xie, Peng Qi, Huan Sun, Yu Su. [paper] [code]
• From RAG to Memory: Non-Parametric Continual Learning for Large Language Models
  Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez*, Yiheng Shu*, Weijian Qi, Sizhe Zhou, Yu Su. In the International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025 (ICML'25) [paper] [code]
• RoboSpatial: Teaching Spatial Understanding to 2D and 3D Vision-Language Models for Robotics
  Chan Hee Song, Valts Blukis, Jonathan Tremblay, Stephen Tyree, Yu Su, Stan Birchfield. In the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2025 (CVPR'25 Oral) [paper]
• Navigating the Digital World as Humans Do: Universal Visual Grounding for GUI Agents
  Boyu Gou, Ruohan Wang, Boyuan Zheng, Yanan Xie, Cheng Chang, Yiheng Shu, Huan Sun, Yu Su. In the International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025 (ICLR'25 Oral) [website] [paper] [code]
• HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models
  Bernal Jiménez Gutiérrez, Yiheng Shu, Yu Gu, Michihiro Yasunaga, Yu Su. In the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024 (NeurIPS'24) [paper] [code]
• Grokked Transformers are Implicit Reasoners: A Mechanistic Journey to the Edge of Generalization
  Boshi Wang, Xiang Yue, Yu Su, Huan Sun. In the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024 (NeurIPS'24) [paper] [code]
• MagicLens: Self-Supervised Image Retrieval with Open-Ended Instructions
  Kai Zhang, Yi Luan, Hexiang Hu, Kenton Lee, Siyuan Qiao, Wenhu Chen, Yu Su, Ming-Wei Chang. In the International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024 (ICML'24 Oral) [website][paper]
• GPT-4V(ision) is a Generalist Web Agent, if Grounded
  Boyuan Zheng, Boyu Gou, Jihyung Kil, Huan Sun, Yu Su. In the International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024 (ICML'24) [website] [paper] [code]
• TravelPlanner: A Benchmark for Real-World Planning with Language Agents
  Jian Xie*, Kai Zhang*, Jiangjie Chen, Tinghui Zhu, Renze Lou, Yuandong Tian, Yanghua Xiao, Yu Su. In the International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024 (ICML'24 Spotlight) [website] [paper] [code]
• BioCLIP: A Vision Foundation Model for the Tree of Life
  Samuel Stevens*, Jiaman Wu*, Matthew J Thompson, Elizabeth G Campolongo, Chan Hee Song, David Edward Carlyn, Li Dong, Wasila M Dahdul, Charles Stewart, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Wei-Lun Chao, Yu Su. In the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2024 (CVPR'24) [website] [paper] [code]
  Best Student Paper
• MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI
  Xiang Yue*, Yuansheng Ni, Kai Zhang, Tianyu Zheng, Ruoqi Liu, Ge Zhang, Samuel Stevens, Dongfu Jiang, Weiming Ren, Yuxuan Sun, Cong Wei, Botao Yu, Ruibin Yuan, Renliang Sun, Ming Yin, Boyuan Zheng, Zhenzhu Yang, Yibo Liu, Wenhao Huang, Huan Sun, Yu Su*, Wenhu Chen*. In the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2024 (CVPR'24) [website] [paper] [code] [data] (*: corresponding authors)
  Best Paper Finalist
• Adaptive Chameleon or Stubborn Sloth: Revealing the Behavior of Large Language Models in Knowledge Conflicts
  Jian Xie*, Kai Zhang*, Jiangjie Chen, Renze Lou, Yu Su. In the International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024 (ICLR'24 Spotlight) [paper] [code]
• Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web
  Xiang Deng, Yu Gu, Boyuan Zheng, Shijie Chen, Samuel Stevens, Boshi Wang, Huan Sun, Yu Su. In the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2023 (NeurIPS'23 Spotlight) [paper] [website] [code]
• LLM-Planner: Few-Shot Grounded Planning for Embodied Agents with Large Language Models
  Chan Hee Song, Jiaman Wu, Clayton Washington, Brian M. Sadler, Wei-Lun Chao, Yu Su. In the International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023 (ICCV'23) [paper] [website] [code]
• Don't Generate, Discriminate: A Proposal for Grounding Language Models to Real-World Environments
  Yu Gu, Xiang Deng, Yu Su. In the Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023 (ACL'23) [paper] [code] Outstanding Paper Award

Teaching

• AU2022-2024: CSE6521 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Graduate)
• SP2022: CSE5525 - Foundations of Speech and Language Processing (Undergrad & Graduate)
• AU2021: CSE6521 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (Graduate)
• AU2020: CSE5539 - Cutting-Edge Topics in Natural Language Processing (Undergrad & Graduate)
• SP2020: CSE5243 - Introduction to Data Mining (Undergrad & Graduate)

Sponsers

• We are grateful for NSF (awards 2443149, 2118240, 2112606), ARL, NIH, NAIRR, Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Sciences, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Amazon, Apple, Orby AI, Cisco, Intuit, Walmart, Fujitsu, and OSU TDAI for supporting our research.

Contact

• Email: %s@osu.edu % 'su.809'