Yu Kong

Dr. Yu Kong is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Michigan State University. He is now directing the ACTION Lab. He serves Pattern Recognition and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia as an Associate Editor. He also serves CVPR, ICCV, IJCAI, AAAI, Multimedia, FG, etc., as an Area Chair. He is an IEEE Senior Member.

Dr. Kong is interested in video modeling and human modeling for decision-making support, with the goal of enabling intelligent systems to perceive, reason, and act in complex and dynamic environments. Technically, his work centers on vision–language modeling, human action understanding, and world models. He is particularly interested in learning structured representations from video that capture human and agent intent, actions, and environment dynamics, and in grounding these representations in language to support flexible querying, explanation, and planning. More broadly, his research aims to bridge perception, reasoning, and action by developing multimodal models that support embodied and decision-centric intelligence.

Openings: We have openings for Fall 2026 for Ph.D. students, Visiting Scholars, and Research Assistants. You can either 1) fill in the external contact form (preferred) or 2) send your application package to actionlab@msu.edu. I will review applications periodically. Due to large volume of applications, I am not able to track and respond to every applicant. How to apply?