Dr. Kailai Yang

Dr. Kailai Yang

The University of Manchester.

About me

Hi, I'm Kailai, currently a Postdoc researcher at the University of Manchester. I obained my Ph.D. degree as President's doctoral scholar at The University of Manchester and the NaCTeM group in Dec. 2025. During PhD, I had the most enjoyable collaboration with Prof. Jun'ichi Tsujii and Prof. Sophia Ananiadou. My work has been featured by renowned media such as Forbes. I also spent a wonderful time working with talented researchers from Microsoft Research, Baidu Search Science, and AIST, Japan.

My research mainly lies in natural language processing. I'm now interested in the latest development in large language models. I'm working on aligning LLMs to human preferences and values. I'm also exploring efficient pre-training data mixing methods for foundation models to generally leverage their power. My previous works focus on affective computing and AI for mental health.

I also enjoy the game of basketball, reading, and movies. I'm a huge sci-fi fan. Reach out if you are interested in collaboration or just want to have a nice chat! : )


News

  • ⭐ Jan, 2026 My leading work MentaLLaMA is covered by a recent report from Forbes entitled: Building Open-Source AI Models That Emphasize Generating Mental Health Advice as a representative work in open-source LLMs for mental health.
  • ⭐ Jan, 2026 My work on LLMs during PhD was presented in detail at Stanford AI4MH webinar. Presentation Link.
  • Jan, 2026 Check out our new shared task: PsyDefDetect co-located with BioNLP@ACL 2026!
  • Nov, 2025 Very excited to be invited to give talks about my research at the University of Birmingham!
  • Nov, 2025 My PhD thesis: "Mental Health Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models" has been published and filed by The University of Manchester!
  • Oct, 2025 Selected as top reviewers for NeurIPS 2025!
  • Oct, 2025 Successfully passed my PhD viva!
  • Oct, 2025 Invited to serve on the program committee for ECIR 2026.
  • Sep, 2025 One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
  • Sep, 2025 Invited to serve as an area chair for LREC 2026.

Selected Professional Services

  • Area Chair
    • LREC’ 26
  • Journal Reviewer
    • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
    • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
    • IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
    • Expert Systems with Applications
    • Information Fusion
    • ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
    • Journal of Biomedical Informatics
    • Neural Networks
    • Artificial Intelligence Review
    • Information Processing & Management
  • Program Committee/Reviewer
    • NeurIPS
    • NAACL
    • EMNLP
    • WWW
    • ACL
    • COLING
    • EACL
    • AAAI
    • SIGIR
    • ECIR