Renly Xinhai Hou

[Curriculum Vitae]

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Bioinformatics and Scientific Computing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I am co-advised by Dr. Todd Hollon and Dr. Brian Athey. I hold an M.S. in Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan and a B.S. in Statistics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

My research focuses on machine learning for computer vision (multimodal understanding and visual reasoning), with a strong focus on training foundation models and developing LLM-based agentic systems. I apply these methods to complex real-world domains such as medical imaging and clinical decision support, creating models that reason more reliably and operate effectively in high-stakes environments.

Before starting my Ph.D. program, I worked as a machine learning engineer intern at Tencent under the supervision of Dr. Pengfei Xiong, where I contributed to projects on title generation and video tagging.