PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yang Fan

Also known as 范阳

Yang Fan is an AI researcher whose work spans machine learning, neural translation, and large language models. He earned computer-science degrees at the University of Science and Technology of China, interned with Microsoft Research Asia, and joined Alibaba's DAMO Academy in 2022. His earlier work includes the 2018 Learning to Teach paper, WMT19 translation systems, and a 2021 data reweighting method; he later coauthored Qwen model reports from 2023 to 2025. In 2026, he coauthored work on language world models for general agents; as of October 2026, he is an NLP Engineer on Alibaba's Qwen Team.

Now at
Alibaba
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2013–2022

    Computer science degrees

    He earns a B.S. in computer science at the University of Science and Technology of China's School of Computer Science and Technology in 2017 and completes a Ph.D. there in 2022.

  2. July 2018–June 2022

    Research intern at Microsoft Research Asia

    From July 2018 to June 2022, he serves as a research intern in Microsoft Research Asia's Machine Learning Group under mentor Tao Qin.

  3. 2018

    Learning to Teach

    He coauthors Learning to Teach with Fei Tian, Tao Qin, Xiang-Yang Li, and Tie-Yan Liu for ICLR in 2018.

  4. 2019

    Eight WMT19 task wins

    He coauthors Microsoft Research Asia's Systems for WMT19 in 2019, when the team wins the championship in eight translation tasks at ACL's Conference on Machine Translation.

  5. 2021

    Learning to Reweight

    At AAAI in 2021, he coauthors Learning to Reweight with Deep Interactions. The method uses a student's internal states to produce adaptive weights for training samples.

  6. July 2022–March 2025

    Senior algorithm engineer

    He joins DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group, as a Senior Algorithm Engineer in July 2022 and holds the role through March 2025.

  7. 2023–2025

    Qwen technical reports

    He coauthors Qwen Technical Report in 2023, which introduces base pretrained models and chat models. Qwen2 presents base and instruction-tuned language and multimodal models in 2024, and Qwen2.5 scales pretraining data to 18 trillion tokens in December 2024. He coauthors Qwen3 in May 2025, which combines thinking and non-thinking modes and expands language support to 119 languages and dialects.

  8. As of October 2026

    Qwen-AgentWorld for agents

    In June 2026, he coauthors Qwen-AgentWorld, which studies language-based world models for general agents. As of October 2026, he is an NLP Engineer on Alibaba's Qwen Team.

Career

  1. Since 2022AlibabaSenior Algorithm Engineer
  2. 2018–2022Microsoft Research AsiaResearch intern

Education

  1. 2022University of Science and Technology of ChinaPh.D.
  2. 2017University of Science and Technology of ChinaB.S.

From the biography.

  1. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Yang Fan. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  2. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Alibaba. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.
  3. The top 10 organizations employed 22% of people shaping AI in 2025: 51% of company researchers and 21% of university researchersIncludes Alibaba. We estimate the share of people shaping AI who worked at the top 10 organizations each year from 1955 to 2025, comparing concentration across companies, universities, and institutes and labs.
  4. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Alibaba. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Yang Fan yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Yang Fan（范阳） fyabc.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Learning to Reweight with Deep Interactions | Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence ojs.aaai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Qwen Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Qwen2 Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Qwen2.5 Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Qwen3 Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Qwen-AgentWorld: Language World Models for General Agents arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. fyabc (Yang Fan) · GitHub github.com. Checked 21 October 2026.