Xingdi (Eric) Yuan

Xingdi Yuan · 袁 星柢

Senior Researcher · Microsoft Research, Montréal

I aim to develop machines that can read, write, and use language as a tool, in both static datasets and interactive worlds.

Current Focus

My recent work focuses on teaching coding AI to better understand codebases and to debug using tools. Find our recent work in Agentic Coding on the Froggy team's page Froggy.

Selected Publications

Machines that can read

  • NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset
    Adam Trischler*, Tong Wang*, Xingdi Yuan*, Justin Harris, Alessandro Sordoni, Philip Bachman, Kaheer Suleman
    RepL4NLP Workshop, ACL 2017
    ArXiv
  • Building Dynamic Knowledge Graphs from Text using Machine Reading Comprehension
    Rajarshi Das, Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, Xingdi Yuan, Adam Trischler, Andrew McCallum
    ICLR 2019
    ArXiv
  • Machine Comprehension by Text-to-Text Neural Question Generation
    Xingdi Yuan*, Tong Wang*, Caglar Gulcehre*, Alessandro Sordoni*, Philip Bachman, Saizheng Zhang, Sandeep Subramanian, Adam Trischler
    RepL4NLP Workshop, ACL 2017
    ArXiv
  • Natural Language Comprehension with the EpiReader
    Adam Trischler, Zheng Ye, Xingdi Yuan, Kaheer Suleman
    EMNLP 2016
    ArXiv

Machines that can write

  • Llama See, Llama Do: A Mechanistic Perspective on Contextual Entrainment and Distraction in LLMs Outstanding Paper
    Jingcheng Niu, Xingdi Yuan, Tong Wang, Hamidreza Saghir, Amir H. Abdi
    ACL 2025
    ArXiv
  • General-to-Specific Transfer Labeling for Domain Adaptable Keyphrase Generation
    Rui Meng, Tong Wang, Xingdi Yuan, Yingbo Zhou, Daqing He
    ACL Findings 2023
    ArXiv
  • An Empirical Study on Neural Keyphrase Generation
    Rui Meng, Xingdi Yuan, Tong Wang, Sanqiang Zhao, Adam Trischler, Daqing He
    NAACL 2021
    ArXiv
  • One Size Does Not Fit All: Generating and Evaluating Variable Number of Keyphrases
    Xingdi Yuan*, Tong Wang*, Rui Meng*, Khushboo Thaker, Peter Brusilovsky, Daqing He, Adam Trischler
    ACL 2020
    ArXiv

Machines that can use language as a tool

  • debug-gym: A Text-Based Environment for Interactive Debugging
    Xingdi Yuan*, Morgane M Moss, Charbel El Feghali, Chinmay Singh, Darya Moldavskaya, Drew MacPhee, Lucas Caccia, Matheus Pereira, Minseon Kim, Alessandro Sordoni, Marc-Alexandre Côté*
    2025
    ArXiv
  • BugPilot: Complex Bug Generation for Efficient Learning of SWE Skills
    Atharv Sonwane*, Isadora White*, Hyunji Lee, Matheus Pereira, Lucas Caccia, Minseon Kim, Zhengyan Shi, Chinmay Singh, Alessandro Sordoni, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan
    2025
    ArXiv
  • Gistify! Codebase-Level Understanding via Runtime Execution
    Hyunji Lee, Minseon Kim, Chinmay Singh, Matheus Pereira, Atharv Sonwane, Isadora White, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal, Zhengyan Shi, Alessandro Sordoni, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan, Lucas Caccia
    2025
    ArXiv
  • Enhancing Agent Learning through World Dynamics Modeling
    Zhiyuan Sun, Haochen Shi, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Glen Berseth, Xingdi Yuan, Bang Liu
    EMNLP 2024 Findings
    ArXiv
  • Policy Improvement using Language Feedback Models
    Victor Zhong, Dipendra Misra, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté
    NeurIPS 2024
    ArXiv
  • Language-guided Skill Learning with Temporal Variational Inference
    Haotian Fu, Pratyusha Sharma, Elias Stengel-Eskin, George Konidaris, Nicolas Le Roux, Marc-Alexandre Côté*, Xingdi Yuan*
    ICML 2024
    ArXiv
  • Can Language Models Serve as Text-Based World Simulators?
    Ruoyao Wang, Graham Todd, Ziang Xiao, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Peter Clark, Peter Jansen
    ACL 2024
    ArXiv
  • ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games
    Ruoyao Wang, Graham Todd, Eric Yuan, Ziang Xiao, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Peter Jansen
    EMNLP 2023
    ArXiv
  • Deep Language Networks: Joint Prompt Training of Stacked LLMs using Variational Inference
    Alessandro Sordoni, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Matheus Pereira, Adam Trischler, Ziang Xiao, Arian Hosseini, Friederike Niedtner, Nicolas Le Roux
    2023
    ArXiv
  • Augmenting Autotelic Agents with Large Language Models
    Cédric Colas, Laetitia Teodorescu, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté
    CoLLAs 2023
    ArXiv
  • One-Shot Learning from a Demonstration with Hierarchical Latent Language
    Nathaniel Weir, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Matthew Hausknecht, Romain Laroche, Ida Momennejad, Harm Van Seijen, Benjamin Van Durme
    AAMAS 2023
    ArXiv
  • Asking for Knowledge (AFK): Training RL Agents to Query External Knowledge Using Language
    Iou-Jen Liu*, Xingdi Yuan*, Marc-Alexandre Côté*, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Alexander G. Schwing
    ICML 2022
    ArXiv
  • Interactive Machine Comprehension with Dynamic Knowledge Graphs
    Xingdi Yuan
    EMNLP 2021
    ArXiv
  • ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning
    Mohit Shridhar, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Yonatan Bisk, Adam Trischler, Matthew Hausknecht
    ICLR 2021
    ArXiv
  • Learning Dynamic Knowledge Graphs to Generalize on Text-Based Games
    Ashutosh Adhikari*, Xingdi Yuan*, Marc-Alexandre Côté*, Mikuláš Zelinka, Marc-Antoine Rondeau, Romain Laroche, Pascal Poupart, Jian Tang, Adam Trischler, William L. Hamilton
    NeurIPS 2020
    ArXiv
  • Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure
    Matthew Hausknecht, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan
    AAAI 2020
    ArXiv
  • Interactive Machine Comprehension with Information Seeking Agents
    Xingdi Yuan*, Jie Fu*, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Yi Tay, Christopher Pal, Adam Trischler
    ACL 2020
    ArXiv
  • Interactive Language Learning by Question Answering
    Xingdi Yuan*, Marc-Alexandre Côté*, Jie Fu, Zhouhan Lin, Christopher Pal, Yoshua Bengio, Adam Trischler
    EMNLP 2019
    ArXiv
  • TextWorld: A Learning Environment for Text-based Games
    Marc-Alexandre Côté, Ákos Kádár, Xingdi Yuan, Ben Kybartas, Tavian Barnes, Emery Fine, James Moore, Ruo Yu Tao, Matthew Hausknecht, Layla El Asri, Mahmoud Adada, Wendy Tay, Adam Trischler
    Computer Games Workshop, ICML/IJCAI 2018
    ArXiv

Experience

  • 2017 – Present
    Microsoft Research, Montréal
    Senior Researcher
  • 2015 – 2017
    Maluuba
    (Acquired by Microsoft)

Education

  • 2015
    M.S. Computer Science
    New York University
  • 2011
    B.S. Communications Engineering
    Beijing University of Technology
    北京工业大学

Service

  • Area Chair: ICML, NeurIPS, ARR
  • Action Editor: TACL
  • Outstanding Reviewer: EMNLP 2020, NeurIPS 2021, ICLR 2022, ICML 2022
  • Workshop Organizer: Wordplay Workshop (NeurIPS 2020, NAACL 2022, ACL 2024, EMNLP 2025), KBRL Workshop (IJCAI 2020)

Fun Stuff

asciiko (アス子)

A deep ascii art generator. Check out the YouTube demo or the open-sourced code.