Dr Yali Du is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in AI at King’s College London, and a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. She leads the Cooperative AI Lab. Her research aims to enable machines to exhibit cooperative and safe behaviour in intelligent decision making tasks. Her work focuses on reinforcement learning and multi-agent cooperation, with topics such as generalization, zero-shot coordination, evaluation of human and AI players, and social agency (e.g., human-involved learning, safety, and ethics). She was chosen for the AAAI New Faculty Highlights award (2023), Rising Star in AI 2023. She has given tutorials on cooperative multi-agent learning at ACML 2022 and AAAI 2023. She serves as the editors for Journal of AAMAS and IEEE Transactions on AI, Area Chair for NeurIPS 2024. She also serves in organising committee for AAMAS 2023 and NeurIPS 2024. Her research is also supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council(EPSRC) and AI Safety Insitute (AISI).

Excited to share that we receive support from the UK AI Safety Institute for our research on the systemic safety of large language models, with a particular focus on the emergent behaviors of LLM agent groups. One Postdoc position is funded.

For group news, please also visit here.

What’s New

• 18 Mar 2025 - We’ve released SocialJax — a suite of sequential social dilemma environments for multi-agent RL in JAX, developed together with DeepMind researcher Joel Leibo. Built for speed, SocialJax leverages JAX’s GPU/TPU acceleration to scale MARL research. Code is available here.
• 18 Mar 2025 The UK Multi-Agent Systems Symposium 2025 (UK-MAS) will be held at King’s College London as a fringe event of AI UK. We warmly welcome you to attend!

I will speak at the following events:

• 1 Apr 2025 - Social Norms Seminars, Royal Holloway, University of London.
• 28 Feb 2025 - UCL JumpTrading/ELLIS CSML Seminar Series.
• 22 Nov 2024 - Invited talk at JPMC AI in Dynamic Decision-Making Seminar, J.P. Morgan AI Research Group.
• 6 Nov 2024 - I am invited to speak at the UKSIF’s Leadership Summit, hosted by UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association on Responsible AI in building portfolios.
• 1 Nov 2024 - Invited talk at University of Macao on Cooperative AI Agents, hosted by Qingbiao Li.
• 23 Oct 2024 - Invited talk at Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) Global Ethics Day to discuss ethical practices related to accountancy.
• 10 Oct 2024 - Invited talk at CCAIS Seminars series AI on citizen-centric AI.
• 26 Sep 2024 - I am invited to speak at the Conversations on AI workshop organised by Cognizant on How AI can responsibly transform financial services?
• 25 Sep 2024 - Invited talk at Center for AI, AstraZeneca.
• 16 Sep 2024 - Invited talk at Ocado Technology on Cooperative AI Agents. We will discuss RL/LLM for multi-agent decision making and its relevance to the areas of robotics.
• 21 May 2024 - King’s Festival of Artificial Intelligence on Perspectives on AI: Learning to Cooperate from Human Instructions.
• 27 Mar 2024 - Invited talk at KCL PHS Departmental Seminars, Department of Population Health Sciences Seminars, KCL.
• 1 Mar 2024 - Invited talk at MBZUAI AI Talks.
• 2 Feb 2024 - Invited talk at Supply Chain AI Lab, University of Cambridge.
• 2 Dec 2023 - Invited talk at e A*STAR Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), Singapore.
• 19 Jul 2023 - Keynote speech at AICC Conference, University of Southampton.
• 16-19 Jul 2023 - Cooperative AI Summer school on human-in-the-loop RL.
• 10-12 Jul 2023 - I am visiting Tsinghua University, Peking University, MSRA, Renmin University in Beijing.
• 7 Jul 2023 - World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Shanghai China.
• 9nd Jun 2023 - Berkeley MARL seminar, UC Berkeley on human-in-the-loop RL, host by Eugene Vinitsky.
• 28 May 2023 - King’s Festival of Artificial Intelligence on Learning to play games with human and learning with human to play
• 24th May 2023 - Computer Science Colloquium at Dept. of Computer Science, University of Warwick.
• 23th May 2023 - School of Computing, Australian National University, host by Dr. Liang Zheng. I will give a guest lecture on “Introdoction to Reinforcement Learning”
• 17th May 2023 - Invited Talk @ Fidelity AI Center, Fidelity Investments, on RL with human values.
• 8th May 2023 - Tutorial on “machine learning optimisation” in Oxford Machine Learning Summer School. Please find out more here!
• 19-21 Feb - Rising Star in AI symposium at KAUST, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.
• 10 Feb 2023 - Selected to speak for AAAI New Faculty Highlights Program.
• 7 Feb 2023 - Tutorial on “Cooperative multi-agent learning” at AAAI 2023. Please find out more here.

Contact

Email: yali.du AT kcl.ac.uk
Address: Bush House, 30 Aldwych, WC2B 4BG