HKUST
academicThe Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (est. 1991, Clear Water Bay) is anchored in this index by hkust-nlp, Junxian He's group and a central node of open RL-for-reasoning research: SimpleRL was the first widely-replicated open reproduction of R1-style "zero RL" on small base models, followed by the Toolathlon agent benchmark (ICLR 2026), the KernelGYM/Dr.Kernel GPU-kernel RL environment (ICML 2026), WebExplorer, and the legacy C-Eval Chinese evaluation standard. CodeI/O (ICML 2025 Oral) was co-developed with DeepSeek.
Beyond hkust-nlp: Tong Zhang's OptimalScale group built the LMFlow finetuning toolkit (8.5K★, NAACL 2024 demo best paper; Zhang has since moved to UIUC), and Jiaya Jia's lab arrived from CUHK around 2023–24 (GitHub org renamed dvlab-research → JIA-Lab-research), continuing the Mini-Gemini line into MGM-Omni, DreamOmni2, and the VisionThink/Seg-Zero RL visual-reasoning series. Yangqiu Song's KnowComp builds knowledge infrastructure (AutoSchemaKG, MMLongBench).
HKUST also hosts and leads HKGAI, the government-backed InnoHK consortium directed by Provost Yike Guo behind the HKGAI-V1–V3 "regional sovereign LLM" series — full-parameter localization post-training of DeepSeek bases running on Ascend hardware; it is a consortium effort, not a sole-university artifact. Personnel note: Sung Kim is on leave as CEO of Upstage.
People
- Junxian He Google Scholar — Assistant Professor, CSE; leads hkust-nlp (SimpleRL, Toolathlon, Dr.Kernel, C-Eval)
- Jiaya Jia Google Scholar — Chair Professor, CSE; Jia Lab (Mini-Gemini/MGM-Omni, LISA, DreamOmni) (formerly Professor, CUHK (moved ~2023-24); founder, SmartMore)
- Qifeng Chen Google Scholar — Associate Professor, CSE; video and visual generation; HKGAI involvement
- Yangqiu Song Google Scholar — Professor, CSE; leads KnowComp (AutoSchemaKG, MMLongBench)
- Yike Guo Google Scholar — Provost & Chair Professor; Director, HKGAI (InnoHK sovereign-LLM program) (formerly Professor, Imperial College London)