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. Since February 2026, I have also been serving as a Postgraduate Teaching Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Sydney.

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.

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!

Teaching

Since February 2026, I have been serving as a Postgraduate Teaching Fellow in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The University of Sydney.

• Semester 1, 2026: MATH1061