Kuang Yuan

I am an Applied Scientist at Meta Reality Labs, where I develop intelligent audio algorithms on wearables and robotics. My research interests lie in intelligent audio and sensing systems, efficient edge AI, and representation learning.

I earned my Ph.D. in ECE at Carnegie Mellon University. My advisor is Prof. Swarun Kumar and I also worked closely with Prof. Justin Chan. I'm a recipient of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2021 with the Guo Moruo Scholarship (The highest honor for USTC students). I was also fortunate to work with Prof. Jie Xiong during my undergrad years and the 2023 summer internship at Microsoft Research Asia.

During my PhD, I developed intelligent audio systems and sensing technologies, to promote human well-being in everyday life and support seamless human-computer interfaces. I designed and built mobile systems which integrate sensors (acoustics, radar, IMU, etc.), real-time signal processing, and machine learning algorithms.

News

Selected Publications

Active Noise Cancellation on Open-ear Smart Glasses

Kuang Yuan*, Freddy Yifei Liu*, Tong Xiao, Yiwen Song, Chengyi Shen, Saksham Bhutani, Justin Chan, Swarun Kumar (*Co-primary Author)
Accepted to Nature Communications
[Preprint]

Measuring multi-site pulse transit time with an AI-enabled mmWave radar

Jiangyifei Zhu*, Kuang Yuan*, Akarsh Prabhakara, Yunzhi Li, Gongwei Wang, Kelly Michaelsen, Justin Chan, Swarun Kumar (*Co-primary Author)
Nature Communications
[Paper]
Press: CMU, LinkedIn

Lightweight and Generalizable Acoustic Scene Representations via Contrastive Fine-tuning and Distillation

Kuang Yuan, Yang Gao, Xilin Li, Xinhao Mei, Syavosh Zadissa, Tarun Pruthi, Saeed Bagheri Sereshki
IEEE ICASSP'26
[Paper]

Towards Seeing Bones at Radio Frequency

Yiwen Song, Hongyang Li, Kuang Yuan, Ran Bi, Swarun Kumar
ACM MobiSys'26
[Paper]

SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures

Kuang Yuan*, Yifeng Wang*, Xiyuxing Zhang*, Chengyi Shen, Swarun Kumar, Justin Chan (*Co-primary Author)
ACM CHI'26
[Paper] [Video] [Talk]
Press: CMU

WindDancer: Understanding Acoustic Sensing under Ambient Airflow

Kuang Yuan, Dong Li, Hao Zhou, Zhehao Li, Lili Qiu, Swarun Kumar, Jie Xiong
ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp'25)
[Paper] [Code]

ToMoBrush: Exploring Dental Health Sensing Using a Sonic Toothbrush

Kuang Yuan, Mohamed Ibrahim, Yiwen Song, Guoxiang Deng, Suvendra Vijayan, Robert Nerone, Akshay Gadre, Swarun Kumar
ACM IMWUT (Ubicomp'24)
[Paper] [Video] [Talk]
Press: CMU, Medical Xpress, Bite Magazine, Panda Oral, Dental Tribune, O Jornal Dentistry, ZWP Online, OTSZ Online, Melton Dental, Hi-Tech Mail, Health of Ukraine, Postimees, 网易, 21dB声学人
Best Demo Award (MobiSys'25)    New Quality Design Bronze Award (新质点设计奖铜奖)

DeWinder: Single-Channel Wind Noise Reduction using Ultrasound Sensing

Kuang Yuan*, Shuo Han*, Swarun Kumar, Bhiksha Raj (*Co-primary Author)
Interspeech'24
[Paper] [Poster]

Rethinking Orientation Estimation with Smartphone-equipped Ultra-wideband Chips

Hao Zhou, Kuang Yuan, Mahanth Gowda, Lili Qiu, Jie Xiong
ACM MobiCom'24
[Paper]

Towards Ubiquitous IoT through Long Range Wireless Energy Harvesting

Mohamed Ibrahim, Atul Bansal, Kuang Yuan, Junbo Zhang, Swarun Kumar
ACM MobiHoc'24
[Paper]

Battery-free Wideband Spectrum Mapping using Commodity RFID Tags

Mohamed Ibrahim, Atul Bansal, Kuang Yuan, Swarun Kumar, Peter Steenkiste
ACM MobiCom'23
[Paper]

EarphoneTrack: Involving Earphones into the Ecosystem of Acoustic Motion Tracking

Gaoshuai Cao*, Kuang Yuan*, Jie Xiong, Panlong Yang, Yubo Yan, Hao Zhou, and Xiang-Yang Li (*Co-primary Author)
ACM SenSys'20
[Paper] [Talk] [Slides]

Awards