Tianyi Gao

Hi! I am a first-year CS PhD student in the Multimodal Vision Research Laboratory at Washington University (WashU), advised by Dr. Nathan Jacobs. I work on computer vision and multimodal learning.

Before joining WashU, I obtained my Bachelor's and Master's degree from Wuhan University (WHU). I also spent a wonderful time at Microsoft Research Asia in 2024, working on MLLMs for scientific diagrams. Happy for research discussions and collaborations!

Email / CV / Google Scholar / Github

News

[2026] PRUE accepted at CVPR 2026 and featured on Taylor Geospatial.
[2025] PEACE accepted at CVPR 2025 and featured on Microsoft Foundry Labs.
[2024] Joined Microsoft Research Asia as a research intern on MLLMs research.
[2024] 3rd place in CVPR OpenEarthMap Few-shot Challenge.

Research

My past research focused on learning representations for few-shot scenarios and building MLLMs for geospatial tasks. Currently, I am working on multimodal learning and world model-related problems. If you share similar interests, feel free to reach out for collaboration!

PEACE: geologic map understanding with MLLMs

PEACE: Empowering Geologic Map Holistic Understanding with MLLMs
Yangyu Huang*, Tianyi Gao*, Haoran Xu, Qihao Zhao, Yang Song, Zhipeng Gui, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Scarlett Li, Furu Wei
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
Microsoft Foundry Labs Project

We introduce GeoMap-Bench, a vision-language benchmark for geologic map understanding. It consists of 25 task types, which measure abilities across 5 aspects. Our benchmark reveals a significant performance gap between state-of-the-art MLLMs and human experts, we further explore agentic baselines to improve the performance.

PRUE: field boundary segmentation at scale

PRUE: A Practical Recipe for Field Boundary Segmentation at Scale
Gedeon Muhawenayo, Caleb Robinson, Subash Khanal, Zhanpei Fang, Isaac Corley, Alexander Wollam, Tianyi Gao, Leonard Strnad, Ryan Avery, Lyndon Estes, Ana M. Tárano, Nathan Jacobs, Hannah Kerner
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026
Project

PRUE delivers a deployment-oriented framework for large-scale field boundary segmentation, developed with industry (Microsoft, Wherobots) and academic (ASU, WashU, OSU, Clark) collaborators, and demonstrates that a strong, well-engineered recipe can outperform a wide range of geospatial foundation models under real-world conditions.

Few-shot semantic segmentation in remote sensing with foundation models

Enrich Distill and Fuse: Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation in Remote Sensing Leveraging Foundation Model's Assistance
Tianyi Gao, Wei Ao, Xing-Ao Wang, Yuanhao Zhao, Ping Ma, Mengjie Xie, Hang Fu, Jinchang Ren, Zhi Gao
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW, Oral), 2024

We incorporate general VLMs into existing GFSS pipelines through support set augmentation and knowledge distillation, which secured 3rd place in CVPR OpenEarthMap Few-shot Challenge.

Query adaptive transformer for few-shot remote sensing segmentation

Query Adaptive Transformer and Multiprototype Rectification for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Tianyi Gao, Zhi Gao, Hong Ji, Wei Ao, Weiwei Song
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGRS), 2024

We propose a few-shot segmentation method that generates segmentor weights per-query using query-aware feature extraction and prototype rectification.

Prompting-to-Distill for few-shot learning

Prompting-to-Distill semantic knowledge for few-shot learning
Hong Ji, Zhi Gao, Jinchang Ren, Xing-ao Wang, Tianyi Gao, Wenbo Sun, Ping Ma
IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters (GRSL), 2024

Adapting Vision Transformer for few-shot remote sensing segmentation

Adapting Vision Transformer for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Segmentation: Synergizing In-Domain Representations And Pretrained Model Guidance
Tianyi Gao, Zhi Gao
IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS, Oral), 2024

Dual-modality vehicle anomaly detection via bilateral trajectory tracing
Jingyuan Chen, Guanchen Ding, Yuchen Yang, Wenwei Han, Kangmin Xu, Tianyi Gao, Zhe Zhang, Wanping Ouyang, Hao Cai, Zhenzhong Chen
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (AI City Challenge), 2021

Services

Conference Reviewer: CVPR 26 EarthVision, ICLR 26 ML4RS, WACV 26 FoMoV, NeurIPS 25, IGARSS 26 25
Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (IF=11.1), Journal of Remote Sensing (IF=8.8), Remote Sensing Letters (IF=1.5)

Miscellaneous

I love the beauty of nature and delicious food 🍃🍜. I used to capture moments through photos, but now I just prefer to feel them with my heart (and also my stomach).
I enjoy playing basketball and fitness in my spare time. Reading and bouldering are also on my trying-to-develop list, with a rather modest revisit frequency 🛰️🌍
After engaging with many wonderful people during my time at MSRA, I eventually pulled myself back from the edge of job hunting and dived straight into the PhD grind 😁