Yaoyao (Freax) Qian

Yaoyao Qian, also known online as Freax or H-Freax, is an AI researcher based in Boston, Massachusetts, working on large language model agents, human-robot interaction, and embodied AI. Research spans vision-language robotic manipulation (ThinkGrasp, CoRL 2024), agent evaluation and benchmarking (DeployBench, WebGraphEval), task-oriented dialogue and intent modeling, and AI ethics and accessibility. Currently a research staff member at the iTEA Lab, University of Texas at San Antonio, with an M.S. in Information Systems from Northeastern University and a B.E. in Computer Science from Wenzhou University of Technology.

Also known as: Freax, H-Freax, FreaxRuby, Yaoyao(Freax) Qian, 钱瑶瑶.

Research interests

Publications

  1. Yuanli Wang, Yaoyao Qian, Yue Zhang, Hanhan Zhou, Jindan Huang, Tianfu Fu, Qiuyang Mang, Huanzhi Mao, Wenhao Chai, Wendong Fan, Liqiang Jing. “DeployBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Research Artifact Deployment.” EMNLP Findings 2026.
  2. Zhicheng Guo, Xiaoying Zheng, Yueru Yan, Eryclis Rodrigues Bezerra Silva, Yaoyao Qian, Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou, Ece Gumusel. “Inside the Agentic Classroom: Simulating Instructional Dynamics with AI Student Agents.” ASIS&T 2026.
  3. Xiangyi Li, Yimin Liu, Wenbo Chen, Bingran You, Zonglin Di, Yifeng He, Shenghan Zheng, Kyoung Whan Choe, Jiankai Sun, Shuyi Wang, Chujun Tao, Binxu Li, Xuandong Zhao, Hejia Geng, Xiaojun Wu, Junwei Zhou, Xiaokun Chen, Hanwen Xing, Yubo Li, Qunhong Zeng, Di Wang, Yuanli Wang, Roey Ben Chaim, Penghao Jiang, Haotian Shen, Luyang Kong, Xinyi Liu, Runhui Wang, Xuanqing Liu, Jiachen Li, Xin Lan, Yueqian Lin, Wengao Ye, Junwei He, Songlin Li, Yue Zhang, Yipeng Gao, Yijiang Li, Ze Ma, Liqiang Jing, Tianyu Wang, Kaixin Li, Yiqi Xue, Haoran Lyu, Yizhuo He, Yuchen Tian, Shutong Wu, Bowei Wang, Yixuan Gao, Bo Chen, Litong Liu, Sikai Cheng, Jiajun Bao, Shuaicheng Tong, Shuwen Xu, Terry Yue Zhuo, Tinghan Ye, Qi Qi, Miao Li, Longtai Liao, Zelin Tan, Chang Shi, Xilin Tang, Srinath Tankasala, Boqin Yuan, Yaoyao Qian, Jianhong Tu, Chenguang Wang, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Aaron Taylor, Ziyue Yang, Changkun Guan, Zhikang Dong, Xinyu Zhang, Steven Dillmann, Han-chung Lee, Dawn Song. “SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks.” Preprint.
  4. Maijunxian Wang, Ruisi Wang, Juyi Lin, Ran Ji, Thaddäus Wiedemer, Qingying Gao, Dezhi Luo, Yaoyao Qian, Lianyu Huang, Zelong Hong, Jiahui Ge, Qianli Ma, Hang He, Yifan Zhou, Lingzi Guo, Lantao Mei, Jiachen Li, Hanwen Xing, Tianqi Zhao, Fengyuan Yu, Weihang Xiao, Yizheng Jiao, Jianheng Hou, Danyang Zhang, Pengcheng Xu, Boyang Zhong, Zehong Zhao, Gaoyun Fang, John Kitaoka, Yile Xu, Hua Xu, Kenton Blacutt, Tin Nguyen, Siyuan Song, Haoran Sun, Shaoyue Wen, Linyang He, Runming Wang, Yanzhi Wang, Mengyue Yang, Ziqiao Ma, Raphaël Millière, Freda Shi, Nuno Vasconcelos, Daniel Khashabi, Alan Yuille, Yilun Du, Ziming Liu, Bo Li, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu, Vikash Kumar, Yijiang Li, Lei Yang, Zhongang Cai, Hokin Deng. “A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite.” ICML 2026.
  5. Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou, Justin Eric Chen, Xiang Zheng, Yaoyao Qian, Yunpeng Xiao, Kai Shu. “"Everyone Else Does It": The Rise of Preprinting Culture in Computing Disciplines.” ASIS&T 2026.
  6. Yaoyao Qian, Yuanli Wang, Jinda Zhang, Yun Zong, Meixu Chen, Hanhan Zhou, Jindan Huang, Yifan Zeng, Xinyu Hu, Chan Hee Song, Danqing Zhang. “WebGraphEval: Multi-Turn Trajectory Evaluation for Web Agents using Graph Representation.” MTI-LLM @ NeurIPS 2025.
  7. Owen Lewis Howell, Linfeng Zhao, Xupeng Zhu, Yaoyao Qian, Haojie Huang, Lingfeng Sun, Wil Thomason, Robert Platt, Robin Walters. “Clebsch-Gordan Transformer: Fast and Global Equivariant Attention.” Preprint.
  8. Yaoyao Qian*, Yifan Zeng*, Yuchao Jiang, Chelsi Jain, Huazheng Wang. “The Ranking Blind Spot: Decision Hijacking in LLM-based Text Ranking.” EMNLP 2025.
  9. Yaoyao Qian, Jindan Huang, Yuanli Wang, Simon Yu, Kyrie Zhixuan Zhou, Jiayuan Mao, Mingfu Liang, Hanhan Zhou. “WHEN TO ACT, WHEN TO WAIT: Modeling the Intent-Action Alignment Problem in Dialogue.” Social Sim @ COLM 2025.
  10. Haibo Zhao*, Dian Wang*, Yizhe Zhu, Xupeng Zhu, Owen Howell, Linfeng Zhao, Yaoyao Qian, Robin Walters, Robert Platt. “Hierarchical Equivariant Policy via Frame Transfer.” ICML 2025.
  11. Danqing Zhang, Yaoyao Qian, Shiying He, Yuanli Wang, Jingyi Ni, Junyu Cao. “VisualTreeSearch: Understanding Web Agent Test-time Scaling.” ECML-PKDD 2025.
  12. Yaoyao Qian, Xupeng Zhu, Ondrej Biza, Shuo Jiang, Linfeng Zhao, Haojie Huang, Yu Qi, Robert Platt. “ThinkGrasp: A Vision-Language System for Strategic Part Grasping in Clutter.” CoRL 2024.
  13. Haojie Huang, Karl Schmeckpeper, Dian Wang, Ondrej Biza, Yaoyao Qian, Haotian Liu, Mingxi Jia, Robert Platt, Robin Walters. “Imagination Policy: Using Generative Point Cloud Models for Learning Manipulation Policies.” CoRL 2024.
  14. Yaoyao Qian, Xianming Wang. “Analysis of football game performance based on social network.” ICAID 2022.

Elsewhere