About Me
Welcome! I’m Yifei Zhang, a secondthird-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Emory University, where I have the fortune of working with Dr. Liang Zhao. Before this, I obtained my M.S. degree in Data Science from Columbia University and my B.E. degree in Engineering Mechanics from Dalian University of Technology. Additionally, I earned a Master of Engineering Management degree from Duke University.
My research focuses on Explainable AI (XAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), with an emphasis on multimodal learning, model distillation, and evaluation methodologies. As a Ph.D. student at Emory University, I have contributed to multiple research projects and published in top-tier conferences, continuously pushing the boundaries of AI interpretability and efficiency.
I am actively seeking Research Scientist or Applied Scientist full-time roles for 2026. If you have any opportunities, feel free to reach out!
Research Interests
- Explainable AI (XAI): Multimodal Explanation-Guided Learning, Visual Explanation-Guided Learning
- Large Language Models (LLMs): Distillation, Multimodal LLMs, LLM Evaluation
News
- [Jan. 2025] I will rejoin Amazon as an Applied Scientist Intern in Boston for Summer 2025.
- [Sep. 2024] Taken on the role of Student Co-organizer for the Foundation Models for Biological Discoveries (FM4sBio) workshop at AAAI 2025.
- [Jul. 2024] One co-authored paper is accepted by CIKM 2024!
- [May. 2024] One first-author paper is accepted by Findings of ACL 2024, and one co-authored paper is accepted by KDD 2024!
- [May. 2024] I will join Amazon as a Research Scientist Intern at Boston in summer 2024!
- [Apr. 2024] One first-author paper Visual Attention Prompted Prediction and Learning is accepted by IJCAI 2024!
- [Apr. 2024] Taken on the role of Publicity Chair for the ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Deep Learning for Spatiotemporal Data, Applications, and Systems (DeepSpatial’24)
- [Jan. 2024] Our survey paper Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Survey of Resource-Efficient Large Language Models is available on Arxiv!
- [Dec. 2023] One co-author paper is accepted by SDM 2024!
- [Nov. 2023] Our work about Datasets and Benchmarks for Visual Explanation is available online!
- [Aug. 2023] Taken Reviewer Invitations for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.
- [Jul. 2023] One first-author paper is accepted by ICCV 2023!
- [May. 2023] One co-first-author paper is accepted by KDD 2023!
Selected publications and preprints
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Arxiv
Yifei Zhang*, Tianxu Jiang*, Bo Pan, Jingyu Wang, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao (* denotes equal contribution)
Arxiv
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Arxiv
Guangji Bai, Zheng Chai, Chen Ling, Shiyu Wang, Jiaying Lu, Nan Zhang, Tingwei Shi, Ziyang Yu, Mengdan Zhu, Yifei Zhang, Carl Yang, Yue Cheng, Liang Zhao
Arxiv
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Arxiv
Yifei Zhang, Siyi Gu, James Song, Bo Pan, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao
Arxiv
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KDD'24
Qilong Zhao, Yifei Zhang, Mengdan Zhu, Siyi Gu, Yuyang Gao, Xiaofeng Yang, Liang Zhao
The 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2024.
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CIKM' 24
Bo Pan, Zheng Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Yuntong Hu, Liang Zhao
The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2024.
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ACL' 24
Yifei Zhang, Bo Pan, Chen Ling, Yuntong Hu, Liang Zhao
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-Findings), 2024.
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IJCAI' 24
Yifei Zhang, Bo Pan, Siyi Gu, Guangji Bai, Meikang Qiu, Xiaofeng Yang, Liang Zhao
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2024.
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SDM' 24
Dazhou Yu, Binbin Chen, Yun Li, Suman Dhaka, Yifei Zhang, Zhenke Liu, Minxing Zhang, Jie Zhang, Liang Zhao
SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), 2024.
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ICCV'23
Yifei Zhang, Siyi Gu, Yuyang Gao, Bo Pan, Xiaofeng Yang, Liang Zhao
The IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023.
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KDD'23
Siyi Gu*, Yifei Zhang*, Yuyang Gao, Xiaofeng Yang, Liang Zhao (* denotes equal contribution)
The 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2023.
Education Experience
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Emory University, 2022.08-
Ph.D. in Computer Science
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Columbia University, 2020.09-2021.12
M.S. in Data Science
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Duke University, 2019.08-2020.05
Master of Engineering Management
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Dalian University of Technology, 2015.09-2019.06
B.E. in Engineering Mechanics (Excellence Program)
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Internship Experience
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Amazon, 2024.06-2024.09
Research Scientist Intern
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Guotai Junan Securities, 2018.12-2019.03
Equity Research Intern
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Services
Journal Reviewers
Conference Reviewers/Program Committee
- ICLR 2025
- CVPR 2025
- KDD 2025 Research Track
- KDD 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks Track
- ICCV 2025
Workshop Organizers
- Publicity Chair for 4th ACM SIGKDD Workshop on Deep Learning for Spatiotemporal Data, Applications, and Systems (DeepSpatial’24)
- Student Co-organizer for the Foundation Models for Biological Discoveries (FM4sBio) workshop at AAAI 2025.
Awards
- KDD 2023 Student Travel Award
- DUTOAA Seagle Scholarship Award, DUTOAA Foundation
- Academic Excellence Scholarship Award, Dalian University of Technology
- Technological Innovation Scholarship Award, Dalian University of Technology
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