People

Yichao Liang

Research Intern, Basis Research Institute

Yichao Liang is a research intern at Basis and a PhD student at the Computational and Biological Learning Lab (CBL) at Cambridge, supervised by Adrian Weller. His research focuses on the complementary goals of understanding and developing generalist agents, drawing on diverse traditions in AI research, including formal languages, probabilistic modeling, deep learning, and planning.

Website

Position

Research Intern
Basis Research Institute

Education

PhD student, Computational and Biological Learning Lab
University of Cambridge
MSc, Advanced Computer Science
University of Oxford
BSc, Artificial Intelligence
University of Edinburgh

Articles

Basis essays and updates this person wrote or contributed to.

ExoPredicator: Abstracting Time and State for Robot Planning

April 22, 2026

We introduce ExoPredicator, a system that learns abstract world models for robot planning. By abstracting state, time, and both endogenous and exogenous causal processes, ExoPredicator enables robots to quickly learn how dynamic environments work and plan efficiently in them.

AutumnBench: World Model Learning in Humans and AI

July 17, 2025

We’re releasing a new version of Autumn with human baseline results, AI performance comparisons, and an interactive benchmark for world model discovery. This release includes the MARA protocol and provides a public platform for testing causal reasoning capabilities.