HKU
academicThe University of Hong Kong (est. 1911) hosts the densest cluster of frontier-AI groups of any Hong Kong university, all inside its CS department: the XLANG Lab (Tao Yu) — the academic center of gravity for computer-use agents — the HKU NLP Group (hkunlp, Lingpeng Kong), the Data Intelligence Lab (HKUDS, Chao Huang), MMLab@HKU (Ping Luo), and Xihui Liu's video-generation/world-model group. Work ships across several orgs: xlang-ai/xlangai, hkunlp, HKUDS, and Dream-org.
Two lines define the lab. XLANG's OSWorld → OSWorld 2.0 is the de-facto industry benchmark for computer-use agents (cited in Anthropic and OpenAI computer-use announcements), extended by OpenCUA (with Moonshot, NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight) and Spider 2.0 (ICLR 2025 Oral). Kong's hkunlp runs the most credible academic diffusion-LLM program worldwide: the Dream family — the base Dream 7B is filed under Huawei as an HKU-led joint with Noah's Ark Lab, with the HKU-led Dream-Coder/DreamOn line and the seeding DiffuLLaMA recipe here — plus the Polaris RL recipe and the veRL/HybridFlow framework (22.5K★) co-developed with ByteDance Seed.
HKUDS has the highest-adoption OSS portfolio of any HKU lab (LightRAG 37.8K★, RAG-Anything 22.3K★, AutoAgent 9.5K★). Industry entanglement is heavy and needs per-artifact attribution: recurring ByteDance Seed, Moonshot, and Huawei Noah's Ark co-development, and Ping Luo is Deputy Director of the HKU–Shanghai AI Lab joint lab — much of his output ships under SAIL branding.
People
- Tao Yu Google Scholar — Assistant Professor, CS; leads XLANG Lab (OSWorld, OpenCUA, Spider 2.0)
- Lingpeng Kong Google Scholar — Associate Professor, CS; hkunlp co-lead (Dream diffusion-LLM family, Polaris) (formerly Research Scientist, Google DeepMind)
- Chao Huang Google Scholar — Assistant Professor, CS; leads Data Intelligence Lab (HKUDS — LightRAG, RAG-Anything)
- Ping Luo Google Scholar — Associate Professor, CS; MMLab@HKU; Deputy Director, HKU–Shanghai AI Lab joint lab
- Xihui Liu Google Scholar — Assistant Professor, EEE/IDS; video generation and world models (formerly Postdoc, UC Berkeley)