Mingxi Yan Carnegie Mellon · LTI
Some things I’ve built.
Some things I’m figuring out.
I build AI systems and the parts around them. I also play poker and other games, and sometimes invent new variants. I like philosophy, especially logic, and I write about love and growth. Usually, I want to know why something works the way it does.
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Things I spend time on
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Engineering · TikTok01Finding the right data is part of the problem.
An internal AI agent should be able to find a usable data source from a question. The user should not have to know the table name first.
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During my data engineering internship, I worked on data discovery for internal AI agents and a revenue-diagnosis workflow for livestream operations. Both were validated with operations and business stakeholders and adopted into their working process.
What I worked on ↗Research · CMU–Apple02Who is asking changes the attack.
PersonaTeaming adds personas to automated red-teaming. I worked on how those personas are generated and evaluated the workflow across six target models.
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I am the second author on this UIST 2026 paper. I suggested persona as an additional axis, worked on the dynamic generation mechanism, implemented the workflow, and wrote the technical results section.
Read about PersonaTeaming ↗Course project · Poker + AI03A good action. A convincing explanation. Are both right?
I worked on fine-tuning Llama 3 8B to produce a solver-backed poker action and explain it. Improving the explanation came with a small cost to action accuracy.
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With Cassandra Shi and Harry Huang, I used solver-backed labels, teacher-generated explanations, and a rule-based verifier checked against 200 blind human judgments. The tradeoff between action accuracy and explanation quality is part of the result.
The project and paper ↗Side project · Home games04We wanted to play our own rules.
I like playing poker with friends and trying different rules. Dealer’s Choice became a small multiplayer platform for the variants we play at home games.
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The platform supports custom variants and real-time play. I worked on the WebSocket connections, automated testing and deployment, and the AWS deployment. The rules themselves are on this site too.
Explore 12 poker variants ↗Ongoing research · Sapling Lab05When does someone start treating an AI as having a mind?
I am working on a simulation study of how these beliefs form and change over a long conversation.
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The study looks at user characteristics, assistant social behavior, and conversational situation. I lead the NLP side and work on the simulation pipeline and turn-by-turn measurement. The manuscript is in preparation.
The ongoing study ↗Poems & prose06Sometimes I write to find out what I think.
Poems, an essay, and fragments. A different way of working through something that is not quite clear yet.
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These are the pieces already collected on the personal side of this site. Some are in Chinese; some are in English.
Read 2 poems and 1 essay ↗From our home games
Dealer’s choice.
12 variants we play at home games. Some are mine; some I picked up from friends.
Forty-Nine
Five-card draw variant with dual winning conditions: best poker hand and highest sum.
Read the rules ↗Indian 1
Hidden information game where players see everyone's cards except their own.
Read the rules ↗Indian 2
Four-card variant with double board and hidden/shown card selection.
Read the rules ↗Investment
Collaborative variant where players can invest cards in others and earn returns from their wins.
Read the rules ↗Majority Vote
Democratic game where players collectively control which community cards stay.
Read the rules ↗Random Board
Chaos variant where luck determines if community cards are dealt.
Read the rules ↗Regret
Strategic grouping game where early decisions limit later options.
Read the rules ↗A line I kept
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
“As the circle of light increases, so does the circumference of darkness around it.”
“I love you, but it has nothing to do with you.”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
“Sapere aude! Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason.”
“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
“One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed.”
“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
“Life is a never-ending torment, full of suffering and pain. But for every tragedy, there's also beauty—even in the blood-soaked earth.”
“He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.”
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
“People live for living itself, not for anything other than living.”
“There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison.”
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
“He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”