Dr Yali Du is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in AI at King’s College London, where she heads the Distributed AI Group and leads the Cooperative AI Lab. She is also a Turing Fellow and secondee at The Alan Turing Institute, and a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). Her research develops cooperative and safe AI agents that can learn, coordinate, and align with humans in complex decision-making environments, with a focus on scalable multi-agent learning, human–AI coordination, and value alignment. She received the AAAI New Faculty Highlights Award and was named a Rising Star in AI by KAUST in 2023. Dr Du serves as Senior Area Chair for AAMAS, Area Chair for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and IJCAI, Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, and Guest Editor for the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing. She has also served on the organising committees of AAMAS 2023, NeurIPS 2024, DAI 2025, and AAMAS 2027.
I normally recruit 2~3 PhD students each year. If you are interested in joining us, please complete this form and email (yali.du@kcl.ac.uk). See the form for requirements.
- We are organizing the Agentic AI Frontier Online Seminar every Friday at 9 AM PT. Check the upcoming sessions and subscribe to the mailing list here.
- 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.
- 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.
What’s New
- 2 Apr, Invited talk at the Edge AI Agent Workshop at University of Edinburgh. Welcome to attend!
- 22 Mar, I will give a talk at Isambard Summit 2026¶ on Evaluating the cooperative behaviour of systems of generative agents.
- 18th Mar, we are very excited to receive two Responsible Ai UK AI & Robotics Best Research Paper Awards on Scalable Reinforcement Learning and efficient Chain-of-Thought. Huge congratulations to my co-authors and sincere thanks to the community for the recognition and support.
- Jan 2026, I have joined the ELLIS community as an ELLIS Member!
- Nov 2025, Two papers are accepted to EMNLP! I will attend the conference in Suzhou. Look forward to catch up!
- Oct 2025, I am attending IROS 2025 Hangzhou and speak at the Workshop on Generative AI for Robotics and Smart Manufacturing.
- Sep 2025, Invited talk at the workshop on Rethinking Multi-Agent Systems in the Era of LLMs, University of Oxford.
- Aug 2025, Invited for IJCAI Early Career Spotlight Talk 2025.
- Jul 2025, Invited talk at the Apple Reasoning and Planning Workshop in Cupertino.
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!
- 1 Apr 2025 - Invited talk at Social Norms Seminars, Royal Holloway, University of London.
- 28 Feb 2025 - Invited talk at 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@kcl.ac.uk
Address: Bush House, 30 Aldwych, WC2B 4BG