Bio

Weiran Yao is co-founder and Chief AI Officer of actAVA, a workflow-to-model learning platform for healthcare based in Pleasanton, CA. He can be reached at this Email

At actAVA, he owns the AI organization. He leads post-training of Cura 1T, a trillion-parameter healthcare model built on the open-weight Kimi-K2.6 and trained through a human-gated recursive self-improvement loop, in which a training agent finds the model’s capability gaps and closes them with SFT, RL, and self-distillation. Cura 1T ranks at or near the top of frontier baselines on five of six healthcare evaluation panels while holding its out-of-domain reasoning ability. He also leads χ-Bench, a benchmark of long-horizon, policy-rich clinical workflows built with a coalition of 20+ health systems and universities, on which the best frontier agent resolves only 28% of tasks.

Previously he led the post-training team at Salesforce AI Research. There he shipped xLAM, a family of state-of-the-art function-calling models, the synthetic data pipelines behind APIGen, APIGen-MT, and AgentOhana, and Retroformer, a generative critic model for agent self-reflection. He also built agentic systems including CodeGenie Agent, SlackAgents, Ensemble Agents, and Salesforce WebAgent, along with automatic root cause analysis for SRE/AIOps.

He did his PhD and MS in Machine Learning at CMU, focused on model interpretability, where he was advised by Kun Zhang.