Yixuan Gao
Research Scientist at Meta
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 |
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| 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
2025
- HotMobile ’25
VitalHide: Enabling Privacy-Aware Wireless Sensing of Vital SignsIn 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 - SCF ’25
OriStitch: A Machine Embroidery Workflow to Turn Existing Fabrics into Self-Folding 3D TextilesIn Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication, , Oct 2025Media Coverage: Cornell Chronicle
2024
- EWSN ’24
Feasibility of Radio Frequency Based Wireless Sensing of Lead Contamination in SoilIn 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