Short Bio

I am a PhD student in Applied Mathematics at The University of Sydney, working under the supervision of Prof. Eduardo G. Altman and Prof. Tristram Alexander. My research focuses on developing methodological approaches to uncover meso-scale structures in complex networks.

I graduated with first-class honours in Applied Mathematics from The University of Sydney in 2019, where my research explored topic modeling and community detection in complex systems. After completing my undergraduate studies, I worked as a software engineer at Huawei for two years, gaining practical experience in software development and large-scale data analysis. I then pursued a Master’s degree in Computer Science at UMass Amherst, where I conducted research in deep learning under the supervision of Prof. Evangelos Kalogerakis and Dmitry Petrov, focusing on applications in natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and graphics.

News

• [Fed. 2025] Our paper "ShapeWords: Guiding Text-to-Image Synthesis with 3D Shape-Aware Prompts" has been accepted to CVPR 2025. Many thanks to Dmitry and all other collaborators!
• [Dec. 2024] After a three-month wait for my visa, I’m finally about to officially start my PhD in network science at The University of Sydney!
• [Oct. 2023] Our paper "On Surgical Fine-tuning for Language Encoders" has been accepted as part of the Findings of EMNLP 2023. Thanks to all the collaborators!
• Show more
[Jul. 2023] I will do summer research intern at UMass Graphics Lab, working on geometry editing of 2D/3D diffusion models.
[Jun. 2021] I'm proud to share that our paper "Multilayer Networks for Text Analysis With Multiple Data Types" was accepted by EPJ Data Science, a Q1 journal according to the SCImago Journal Rank.
[May 2020] I'm excited to begin my journey as a Software Development Engineer with Huawei in Hangzhou.
[Oct. 2019] I am thrilled to have the opportunity to present my Honours thesis at the Conference on Complex Systems held at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to my supervisor, Eduardo, for his invaluable guidance and support throughout my research journey.

Publications

1. CVPR

   ShapeWords: Guiding Text-to-Image Synthesis with 3D Shape-Aware Prompts

   Dmitry Petrov, Pradyumn Goyal, Divyansh Shivashok, Yuanming Tao, Melinos Averkiou, Evangelos Kalogerakis

   CVPR, 2025

   PDF Project Page


2. EMNLP

   On Surgical Fine-tuning for Language Encoder

   Abhilasha Lodha*, Gayatri Belapurkar*, Saloni Chalkapurkar*, Yuanming Tao*, Reshmi Ghosh, Samyadeep Basu, Dmitrii Petrov, Soundararajan Srinivasan

   EMNLP Findings, 2023

   PDF Code ^* Equal Contribution


3. EPJ Data Science

   Multilayer Networks for Text Analysis With Multiple Data Types

   Charles C. Hyland, Yuanming Tao, Lamiae Azizi, Martin Gerlach, Tiago P. Peixoto, Eduardo G. Altmann

   EPJ Data Science, 2021

   PDF Code Project Page

Contact

Address: School of Mathematics and Statistics F07, University of Sydney NSW 2006, Australia

Office: Room 528, Carslaw Building

School Email: ytao5219 (at) uni (dot) sydney (dot) edu

Misc

• I grew up in Ürümqi , Xinjiang.
• For most Chinese people, my name is very easy to remember because it is spelled the same as Tao Yuanming, the famous poet from the Eastern Jin dynasty in ancient China.
• Check out my interactive network visualization made with D3.js!