Yixuan Gao

Research Scientist at Meta

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I am Yixuan Gao, a Research Scientist at Meta. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell Tech, where I was advised by Prof. Rajalakshmi Nandakumar; my PhD committee included Prof. Tanzeem Choudhury and Prof. Deborah Estrin. Before coming to Cornell, I conducted undergraduate research under the supervision of Prof. Tim Brecht and Prof. Ali Abedi at the University of Waterloo.

My research focuses on building AI-driven wireless sensing and communication systems to address challenges in health and the environment. I also explore the privacy implications of wireless technologies, with a focus on the ethical conduct of wireless sensing and communication. This includes collaborative work with Prof. Helen Nissenbaum.

I have also worked on HCI and digital fabrication research, in collaboration with Prof. Thijs Roumen. This interdisciplinary work explores the intersection of computational design, interactive systems, and advanced manufacturing techniques.

news

Sep 24, 2026 🎉 “SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks” has been accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations and Datasets Track (acceptance rate 25.8%)! SkillsBench pairs 87 tasks across 8 domains with curated Agent Skills and finds that Skills raise the average agent pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5%. Thanks to the 70+ co-authors led by Xiangyi Li. arXiv:2602.12670
Sep 24, 2026 🎉 “3D Point Splatting for mmWave Radar Novel View Synthesis” by Adnan Armouti, Yixuan Gao, and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar has been accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Main Track (acceptance rate 25.7%)! 3DPS is the first differentiable point renderer for radar: one optimized scene renders ADC, complex range profile, and range-azimuth outputs, with about 3 minutes of training per scene. arXiv:2609.11894
Sep 08, 2026 🎉 “StitchOver: Technical Embroidery on Seamed Fabrics” by Zekun Chang, Tianhong Catherine Yu, Yixuan Gao, and Thijs Roumen has been accepted to ACM UIST 2026 (acceptance rate 20.1%)! StitchOver introduces “JumpStitches” that let machines reliably embroider functional threads across seams. arXiv:2609.08311
Aug 14, 2026 🎉 “RadarAgent: Agentic Tool Utilization for Radar-to-Language Understanding” by Shuang He, Yixuan Gao, and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar has been accepted to HumanSys 2026 (Austin, TX)! RadarAgent lets a foundation model call radar-processing tools to describe human motion in natural language, with no radar-token pretraining.
Jul 2026 đź’Ľ I joined Meta as a Research Scientist in July 2026! Huge thanks to my advisor Prof. Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, my committee, and all my collaborators at Cornell Tech.
Jun 29, 2026 🎉 “mmFHE: mmWave Sensing with End-to-End Fully Homomorphic Encryption” by Tanvir Ahmed, Yixuan Gao, Adnan Armouti, and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar has been accepted to ACM MobiCom 2026! mmFHE is the first system to run the entire cloud-side mmWave sensing pipeline, including DSP and ML inference, under fully homomorphic encryption. arXiv:2603.22437
Jun 20, 2026 🎉 “mmIR: Frequency-Space Inverse Rendering for 3D Millimeter-Wave Radar ADC Synthesis” by Adnan Armouti, Yixuan Gao, and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar has been accepted to ECCV 2026! mmIR is an open-source differentiable FMCW radar inverse renderer that synthesizes high-resolution 3D radar data from real captures. Project page · Poster
Mar 26, 2026 📄 New preprint “mmFHE: mmWave Sensing with End-to-End Fully Homomorphic Encryption” by Tanvir Ahmed, Yixuan Gao, Adnan Armouti, and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar is now on arXiv. mmFHE is the first end-to-end FHE system for mmWave radar sensing, with negligible utility loss compared to plaintext processing.
Mar 18, 2026 🎉 SoilSound and SoilScanner have been accepted for a demo at The 23rd World Congress of Soil Science (WCSS 2026).
Nov 05, 2025 📄 New preprint “PrivyWave: Privacy-Aware Wireless Sensing of Heartbeat” available on arXiv:2511.02993. First work to enable selective privacy in wireless heartbeat sensing!
Sep 18, 2025 🎙️ Invited talk at Cornell Tech Digital Life Seminar: “Seeing Without Seeing: Privacy Challenges in Innovations of Wireless Sensing”. Seminar Info • Video Recording
Sep 15, 2025 📄 New preprint “SoilSound: Smartphone-based Soil Moisture Estimation” available on arXiv:2509.09823
Sep 04, 2025 📄 Co-authored paper “Assembly Stethoscope: Detecting Assembly Errors through Frequency Sweeping–A Feasibility Study” (first author: Liu Bo) accepted at IASA 2025
Aug 30, 2025 📄 Co-authored paper “OriStitch: A Machine Embroidery Workflow to Turn Existing Fabrics into Self-Folding 3D Textiles” (first author: Zekun Chang) accepted at ACM SCF 2025
Jun 26, 2025 🎙️ Invited Talk at Joan and Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute Steering Committee: “Building the Next Generation of Wireless and Mobile Sensing Systems for Societal Impact”. Spotlight on Jacobs Junior Faculty research highlights.
Feb 26, 2025 🎙️ Conference Talk at HotMobile 2025: Presented “VitalHide” in the “Sensing, Privacy, and AI” session. Program
Dec 13, 2024 🏆📄 Our paper “Feasibility of Radio Frequency Based Wireless Sensing of Lead Contamination in Soil” won the Best Paper Award at EWSN 2024!

selected publications

2026

  1. NeurIPS ’26
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    SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks
    Xiangyi Li, Yimin Liu, Wenbo Chen, Yixuan Gao, and others
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Evaluations and Datasets Track (NeurIPS ’26), 2026
    NeurIPS 2026 Evaluations and Datasets Track acceptance rate: 25.8% (971/3757)
  2. NeurIPS ’26
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    3D Point Splatting for mmWave Radar Novel View Synthesis
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS ’26), 2026
    NeurIPS 2026 Main Track acceptance rate: 25.7% (7900/30709)
  3. HumanSys ’26
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    RadarAgent: Agentic Tool Utilization for Radar-to-Language Understanding
    Shuang He, Yixuan Gao, and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar
    In The 4th International Workshop on Human-Centered Sensing, Modeling, and Intelligent Systems (HumanSys ’26), Oct 2026
  4. UIST ’26
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    StitchOver: Technical Embroidery on Seamed Fabrics
    Zekun Chang, Tianhong Catherine Yu, Yixuan Gao, and Thijs Roumen
    In Proceedings of the 39th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’26), Oct 2026
    UIST 2026 acceptance rate: 20.1% (253/1259)
  5. MobiCom ’26
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    mmFHE: mmWave Sensing with End-to-End Fully Homomorphic Encryption
    In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom ’26), Oct 2026
  6. ECCV ’26
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    mmIR: Frequency-Space Inverse Rendering for 3D Millimeter-Wave Radar ADC Synthesis
    In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV ’26), Oct 2026
    📍 Poster at ECCV 2026 (Thu, Sep 10)

2025

  1. HotMobile ’25
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    VitalHide: Enabling Privacy-Aware Wireless Sensing of Vital Signs
    In Proceedings of the 26th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (HotMobile ’25), Oct 2025
    📍 Presented at NYC Privacy Day at Google (Fall 2024) • 🌟 Showcase: Kudos Publication Reader
    *Equal contribution
  2. SCF ’25
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    OriStitch: A Machine Embroidery Workflow to Turn Existing Fabrics into Self-Folding 3D Textiles
    Zekun Chang, Yixuan Gao, Yuta Noma, Shuo Feng, Xinyi Yang, Kazuhiro Shinoda, Tung Ta, Koji Yatani, Tomoyuki Yokota, Takao Someya, Tomohiro Tachi, Yoshihiro Kawahara, Koya Narumi, Francois Guimbretiere, and Thijs Roumen
    In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication, , Oct 2025
    Media Coverage: Cornell Chronicle
  3. IASA ’25
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    Assembly Stethoscope: Detecting Assembly Errors through Frequency Sweeping-A Feasibility Study
    In Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Workshop on Intelligent Acoustic Systems and Applications (IASA ’25), Hong Kong, China, Oct 2025
  4. arXiv
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    SoilSound: Smartphone-based Soil Moisture Estimation
    Yixuan Gao, Tanvir Ahmed, Shuang He, Zhongqi Cheng, and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.09823, Oct 2025
    đź“‹ Under review at a top conference
  5. arXiv
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    PrivyWave: Privacy-Aware Wireless Sensing of Heartbeat
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.02993, Nov 2025
    đź“‹ Under review at a top conference

2024

  1. EWSN ’24
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    Feasibility of Radio Frequency Based Wireless Sensing of Lead Contamination in Soil
    Yixuan Gao, Tanvir Ahmed, Mikhail Mohammed, Zhongqi Cheng, and Rajalakshmi Nandakumar
    In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks (EWSN ’24), Nov 2024
    🏆 Best Paper Award

    Media Coverage: Cornell Chronicle • Karmactive • phys.org • MSN • American Technion Society • X@CornellGrad • Slashdot

2022

  1. JMIR Biomed Eng
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    Equity-Driven Sensing System for Measuring Skin Tone–Calibrated Peripheral Blood Oxygen Saturation (OptoBeat): Development, Design, and Evaluation Study
    Alexander T Adams, Ilan Mandel, Yixuan Gao, Bryan W Heckman, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, and Tanzeem Choudhury
    JMIR Biomedical Engineering, Nov 2022

2018

  1. Poster: MobiCom ’18
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    Analyzing Bitrates in Modern Wi-Fi Networks
    Yixuan Gao, Ali Abedi, Tim Brecht, and Ramya Bhagavatula
    In Proceedings of the 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom’18), Nov 2018