Date: March 20, 2026
Speaker: Yaqi Xie
Title: Knowledge Guided AI Partner
Abstract: Building trustworthy AI partners alongside humans faces a reality that scaling alone cannot fix: embodied data is orders of magnitude scarcer than language and vision data. Before sufficient data can be collected, agents need to make smart use of what we have by reasoning with structure. In this talk, I show how structured knowledge and inductive bias can reduce reliance on brute-force data, enabling AI agents to understand context, generalize robustly, and collaborate with humans in the real world. I first introduce how structured knowledge can be embedded directly into neural architectures, integrating logical structure into representations rather than attaching reasoning as a post-hoc module. I then demonstrate how knowledge-guided models support reliable contextual perception, including robust scene understanding and hallucination mitigation. Finally, I present how these grounded representations enable proactive human-robot collaboration across various real-world scenarios, where robots interpret humans intent, anticipate actions, and coordinate behavior in dynamic environments. Together, these efforts outline a pathway toward capable, efficient, and trustworthy AI agents as genuine partners for humans, both digitally and physically.
Bio: Yaqi Xie is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Katia Sycara. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore, advised by Harold Soh. Her research focuses on human-AI synergy through neuro-symbolic fusion, bridging deep learning and symbolic reasoning to build trustworthy AI partners. Her long-term vision is to endow intelligent agents with knowledge-guided world models that evolve through continual interaction. She serves as an Organizing Committee member and Area Chair at top-tier venues such as HRI and NeurIPS. She has received several distinctions, including the NUS Achievement Award and the Keppel Award of Excellence. Her works have been recognized with Best Paper Awards at RSS 2025 GenAI-HRI and ICRA 2025 Nonverbal Cues workshops.