PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yu Wan

Also known as 万宇

Yu Wan is an NLP researcher at Alibaba's Tongyi Lab, where they focus on Qwen interpretability and multilingualism. They studied at Xiamen University and the University of Macau and served as a research intern at Alibaba's DAMO Academy. They wrote papers on unsupervised dialect translation, short-text translation errors and UniTE, a machine-translation evaluation framework. They coauthored Qwen2 and Qwen3 reports, Qwen3Guard and, in 2026, Qwen-Scope, an open-source suite of sparse autoencoders built on Qwen.

Now at
Alibaba
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2014–2017

    Master's at Xiamen University

    They study in Xiamen University's NLP Lab as a postgraduate master's student from 2014 to 2017, advised by Yidong Chen.

  2. 2018–2023

    PhD in the NLP2CT Lab

    They pursue a PhD in the NLP2CT Lab at the University of Macau from 2018 to 2023. In February 2023, they prepare to defend a thesis titled “The Semantics-Based Approaches for Automatic Translation Evaluation.”

  3. 2020

    Unsupervised dialect translation

    In 2020, they coauthor an AAAI paper that builds unsupervised translation models from monolingual data for Mandarin and Cantonese.

  4. 2020–2023

    Research intern at DAMO

    They serve as a research intern at Alibaba's DAMO Academy from 2020 to 2023.

  5. 2022

    Short-text translation and UniTE

    In 2022, they coauthor a study of short-text neural machine translation errors, including over-translation and mistranslation. They also coauthor UniTE, a unified translation-evaluation framework for reference-only, source-only and source-reference-combined tasks.

  6. 2024

    Qwen2 technical report

    In 2024, they coauthor Qwen2 Technical Report, which presents dense and mixture-of-experts language models with 0.5 to 72 billion parameters.

  7. 2025

    Qwen3 and multilingual safety

    In 2025, they coauthor the Qwen3 Technical Report, describing dense and mixture-of-experts models with 0.6 to 235 billion parameters. They also coauthor P-MMEval, a parallel multilingual benchmark for translation, code generation and reasoning, and Qwen3Guard, a multilingual safety model with Generative and Stream variants.

  8. Since June 2023

    Tongyi Lab researcher

    They are a researcher at Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group, focusing on multilingualism and Qwen interpretability. In 2026, they coauthor Qwen-Scope, an open-source suite of sparse autoencoders built on the Qwen model family.

Career

  1. Since 2020AlibabaResearch intern, Researcher

Education

  1. 2023University of MacauPhD
  2. 2017Xiamen UniversityMaster's

From the biography.

  1. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Yu Wan. 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.
  2. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Alibaba. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Home - Yu Wan wanyu2018umac.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. [Rescheduled] PhD Oral Defense in Faculty of Science and Technology, by Mr. Yu WAN, on 14 February 2023 e-bulletin.um.edu.mo. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Unsupervised Neural Dialect Translation with Commonality and Diversity Modeling ojs.aaai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Challenges of Neural Machine Translation for Short Texts aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. UniTE: Unified Translation Evaluation aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Qwen2 Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Qwen3 Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. P-MMEval: A Parallel Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Consistent Evaluation of LLMs aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Qwen3Guard Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Qwen-Scope: Turning Sparse Features into Development Tools for Large Language Models arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.