His research interests include computer vision, pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning.

Yang was a Program Co-Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2019, Program Co-Chair of the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) in 2014, and General Co-Chair of ACCV in 2016. He served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) from 2007 to 2011. He was a Co-Editor-in-Chief of Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU). Yang currently serves as an Associate Editor-in-Chief of PAMI and an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV).

He serves as a Senior Area Chair or Area Chair for several conferences, including ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACCV, AAAI, IJCAI, WACV, and FG.

Yang received several paper awards, including the Longuet-Higgins Prize at CVPR 2023, Best Paper at CVPR 2018, Best Student Paper at ACCV 2018, Best Paper honorable mention at 2017 ACM UIST, and Best Paper at 2014 iThings. He was also named one of the Highly Cited Researchers by Clarivate Analytics in 2018-2023.

Yang received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation in 2012 and the Google Faculty Award in 2009. He received the Distinguished Research Award in 2015 and the Distinguished Early Career Research Award from the UC Merced Senate in 2011. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM.