Hi, I'm Weiran Yao

I'm Co-Founder & Chief AI Officer
at actAVA
I build multi-agent AI systems and train the frontier models underneath them.
I co-founded actAVA and own its AI organization. actAVA is a workflow-to-model learning platform for healthcare: we give enterprises agentic sovereignty — the ability to build, test, and own their AI agents and models.
I lead post-training of Cura 1T, our trillion-parameter healthcare model, trained through a 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 ranks at or near the top of frontier baselines on five of six healthcare evaluation panels while holding its out-of-domain reasoning.
I also lead χ-Bench, our benchmark for long-horizon, policy-rich clinical workflows, where the best frontier agent resolves only 28% of tasks. On the platform side I work on KORA, a model-independent harness for building, testing, and continually improving agents, and CHRYSO, which enforces AI governance against 85+ regulatory controls.
Previously at Salesforce AI Research, I led the post-training team. We 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 self-reflection.
I also built agent systems there, including SlackAgents, AgentLite, CodeGenie, SWE Agents, and AIOps for cloud incident causation analysis.
I did my Ph.D. and M.S. in Machine Learning at CMU, focusing on model interpretability, where I was advised by Dr. Kun Zhang.

Featured Research Publications

Latest research for fans of AI Agent, RL and Interpretability.

A trillion-parameter healthcare model trained by recursive self-improvement
arXiv 2026
Long-horizon, policy-rich healthcare workflows that frontier agents still cannot finish
arXiv 2026
Generative Critic Model Optimized for Self-Reflection and Reasoning Capabilities of AI Agents
ICLR 2024
SOTA on BFCL leaderboard outperforming all proprietary LLMs
arXiv 2025
World's Best Open-Source Model for Function-Calling
arXiv 2024
Salesforce's In-House Library for Multi-Agent Orchestration and Reasoning
arXiv 2024
AI Software Engineer with 55% resolve rate on SWE-Bench Lite
ICLR 2025
Optimizing Principled Reasoning and Acting of LLM Agent
CoNLL 2024
Salesforce Library for for Fast and Scalable Causal Reasoning
arXiv 2023
Tool for Recovering Causal Concepts and Relations from Videos
ICLR 2022


Featured Engineering Projects

Innovative AI systems I've developed and deployed at scale.

Workflow-to-model learning for healthcare — build, test, learn, own
2025 – Present
Scalable Collaboration for Multiple AI Agents in Workspaces
Jan 2024 – Present
Enhancing IDE Productivity through AI Code Planning, Editing, and Execution
Aug 2024 – Present
AIOps Augments SREs' Capabilities for Automating Operations
Jan 2023 – Dec 2023


Featured Talks & Presentations

My favorite talks and presentations given at industry AI conferences and workshops.

Witness How xLAM and Multi-Agent Framework Revolutionize Automation with A Live Demo for Marketing Sales
Dreamforce 2024
Explore Power of Multi-Agent Reasoning with Software Engineering Agents of Diverse Strengths
CAMEL-AI Workshop 2024