Portrait of Xiaoyang Wang

Trustworthy AI for Healthcare

Xiaoyang Wang (王晓阳) Preferred name: Shawn

I’m a PhD candidate at Drexel University, advised by Prof. Christopher C. Yang in the Health Informatics Research Lab.

Before joining Drexel, I earned my M.S. from the University of Pittsburgh, advised by Prof. Peter Brusilovsky, and my B.E. from Shanghai Normal University.

Research

Clinical AI can be accurate on average yet still fail the patients who need it most — by being unfair, opaque, or confidently wrong. My research targets these failure modes across three connected directions: fair and interpretable prediction, multimodal patient modeling, and reliable medical agents. Currently, my dissertation asks when multi-agent LLM systems in medicine deserve our trust: when they agree, do they actually reason alike?

Fairness & Explainability

I develop learning and optimization methods that make clinical prediction more equitable across demographic groups while preserving predictive performance. This work includes multi-attribute fairness IEEE ICHI 2025, reconciling fairness and accuracy gradients AIME 2025, fairness-aware transfer learning IEEE Access, and explainable prediction for sepsis mortality and treatment completion.

Multimodal Learning

Patients rarely present as a single data type. My multimodal work builds robust representations from whatever combination of modalities is available: MoE-Health ACM BCB 2025 routes heterogeneous health data through a mixture-of-experts design, and DeepSelective Pattern Recognition pairs feature selection with compression so EHR prognosis models stay interpretable.

Medical Agents

When a panel of LLM agents agrees on an answer, should we believe it? My work builds medical agent systems and probes exactly that question: MediHive J Healthc Inform Res coordinates specialized agents without a central controller, The Consistency Illusion shows that debate can align answers while reasoning quietly drifts apart, and a collaborative multi-agent architecture ACM BCB 2025 detects clinical problems from SOAP notes.

News

Earlier news

Publications

* Equal contribution.

EMNLP 2026
Overview figure of the CARA cross-agent reasoning alignment framework

The Consistency Illusion: How Multi-Agent Debate Hides Reasoning Misalignment

Xiaoyang Wang, Christopher C. Yang.

  • This work introduces CARA (Cross-Agent Reasoning Alignment), a family of metrics that tests whether multi-agent LLMs which agree on an answer also share compatible reasoning, revealing a consistency illusion in which debate suppresses agent contradictions while their reasoning chains grow less similar.
  • It proposes the Grounded Debate Protocol (GDP), a lightweight prompt-level intervention that substantially improves cross-agent reasoning alignment across two medical QA benchmarks and two model backbones without adding any LLM calls.
IEEE TIFS
FakeBench benchmark overview for explainable fake image detection

FakeBench: Probing Explainable Fake Image Detection via Large Multimodal Models

Yixuan Li, Xuelin Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Bu Sung Lee, Shiqi Wang, Anderson Rocha, and Weisi Lin.

  • This work introduces FakeBench, a multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate large multimodal models (LMMs) on explainable fake image detection rather than simple binary classification.
  • The benchmark incorporates a fine-grained taxonomy of generative visual forgeries and human-in-the-loop textual descriptions to assess detection, reasoning, interpretation, and detailed forgery analysis.
Pattern Recognition
DeepSelective framework diagram for interpretable EHR prognosis prediction

DeepSelective: Interpretable Prognosis Prediction via Feature Selection and Compression in EHR Data

Ruochi Zhang, Qian Yang, Xiaoyang Wang, Tian Wang, Qiong Zhou, Ziqi Deng, Kewei Li, Yueying Wang, Yusi Fan, Jiale Zhang, Lan Huang, Chang Liu, Fengfeng Zhou.

  • This work proposes DeepSelective, a novel end to end deep learning framework for predicting patient prognosis using EHR data, with a strong emphasis on enhancing model interpretability.
  • DeepSelective combines data compression techniques with an innovative feature selection approach, integrating custom-designed modules that work together to improve both accuracy and interpretability.
Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research
MediHive decentralized multi-agent architecture diagram

MediHive: A Decentralized Agent Collective for Medical Reasoning

Xiaoyang Wang, Christopher C. Yang.

Paper
  • MediHive is a decentralized multi-agent framework for medical question answering, in which LLM-based agents self-assign specialized roles, resolve disagreements through conditional evidence-based debate, and iteratively fuse peer insights via a shared memory pool to reach consensus without any central coordinator.

Background

Education

Honors & Awards

  • The Institute for Healthcare Informatics (IHI) Student Award 2026
  • AIME 2025 Student Scholar Award 2025
  • IEEE ICHI 2025 Student Scholar Award 2025
  • Merit Student Researcher Scholarship, Chinese Academy of Sciences 2017
  • Second Prize Merit Scholarship, Shanghai Normal University 2016

Academic Service

  • Journal Reviewer: JAMIA, J Healthc Inform Res, IEEE TIFS, IP&M, ACM HEALTH, MedIA, and Comput Electr Eng.
  • Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS 2024, AAAI 2025, ICLR 2025, ICWSM 2025, IEEE ICHI 2025 & 2026, WWW 2026, IEEE ICME 2026, and Digital Twins for Health Society (DT4HS).

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant · Drexel University

  • INFO 103Introduction to Data Science
    Winter & Spring 2026
  • INFO 152Web Systems & Services II
    Spring 2026
  • INFO 250Information Visualization
    Spring 2026
  • INFO 623Social Network Analysis
    Spring 2026
  • INFO 212Data Science Programming I
    Fall 2024

Teaching Assistant · Shanghai Normal University

  • Digital Switching
    Spring 2017

Visitor Map

Hello, world!

Thanks for visiting. I am open to collaborations on trustworthy AI for healthcare, multimodal learning, and multi-agent systems. Feel free to get in touch.