Xu Cao
Building AI agents that understand humans — and grow up with children.
I am a CS PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. James M. Rehg and Prof. Jimeng Sun. My research sits at the intersection of vision-language models, agentic AI, and social embodied AI, with applications spanning AR smart glasses and pediatric foundation models.
Driven by my own history as a pediatric rare-disease patient, I co-founded PediaMed AI to advance AI built specifically for pediatrics and child development — in particular, intelligent agents for the early identification, diagnosis, and treatment of cerebral palsy, autism, developmental disorders, and rare neurodevelopmental diseases.
- SambaNova SystemsML Engineer
- TencentML Engineer
- NEC Labs AmericaResearch Intern
- Google ResearchResearch Intern
- Meta Reality LabsResearch Intern
- NYU CourantMS, Computer Science
- Fudan UniversityBS, Chemistry & Data Science
News
- Awarded the grant in Anthropic's AI for Science Rare Disease Research Program.
- Video-based Disease Progression Simulation won the Best Paper Award at CHIL 2026.
- ChildGait — joint work by UIUC, PediaMed AI, and Shenzhen Children's Hospital — is accepted to ECCV 2026.
- Presented GazeAnywhere at the NVIDIA Tech Talk at CVPR 2026.
- Several demos from the team presented at CVPR 2026 in Denver.
- Serving as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.
- Multiple papers accepted to CVPR 2026 with collaborators at UIUC, Google AR, and PediaMed AI.
- Organizing the CVPR 2026 Workshop on Computer Vision for Children (CV4CHL) with Prof. Ismini Lourentzou's team.
- Awarded the Next Generation Trainee Fellowship from CIFAR.
Research — three pillars
Agent Learning from Children
Cognitive-learning-inspired Multimodal LLMs: studying how children acquire perception, language, and reasoning to build models that learn the same way.
RepresentativeChronoVision (EMNLP 2026) · CogSense (arXiv) · VCog-Bench (COLM 2025)
Social Embodied AI Agents
The core thread of my PhD: agents that perceive non-verbal social cues (gaze, gesture, and emotion) — moving from social perception toward theory of mind, on platforms like AR smart glasses.
Representative GazeAnywhere (CVPR 2026) · SocialGesture (CVPR 2025) · TransGesture (NeurIPS 2025)
Pediatric Foundation Models & Healthcare AI
Foundation models for child development and neurodevelopmental disorders, from autism screening to video-based disease progression simulation.
Representative ChildGait (ECCV 2026) · MedDream (CHIL 2026 Best Paper) · AggPose (IJCAI 2022)
Startup
PediaMed AI
With Dr. Meihuan Huang, I co-founded and co-direct a lab of ten researchers building AI for pediatrics and child development — from cognitive multimodal LLMs to AI agents for neurodevelopmental disorders screening. We also run the AI4CHL (ICLR 2025) and CV4CHL (CVPR 2026) workshop series.
- EMNLP 2026ChronoVision: Temporal Reasoning via Latent State Reconstruction
- ECCV 2026ChildGait: Decoding Children's Gait Behavior from Video
- CVPR 2026Enhancing Video Vision Language Model with Hippocampal Sensing Highlight
- Tech ReportEvaluating Cognitive Age Alignment in Interactive AI Agents
- Tech ReportToward Cognitive Supersensing in Multimodal Large Language Models
We are open to venture investment and collaboration — feel free to reach out.
Selected publications
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CHIL 2026Best Paper Award
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CVPR 2026Spotlight DemoGAZE Oral
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NeurIPS 2025
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CVPR 2025
SocialGesture: Delving into Multi-person Gesture Understanding
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COLM 2025
What is the Visual Cognition Gap between Humans and Multimodal LLMs?
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CVPR 2024
MAPLM: A Real-World Large-Scale Vision-Language Benchmark for Map and Traffic Scene Understanding
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AAAI 2023Oral · Innovative Application Award
THMA: Tencent HD Map AI System for Creating HD Map Annotations
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IJCAI 2022Oral
AggPose: Deep Aggregation Vision Transformer for Infant Pose Estimation