Yifei Zhang

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 encompasses Explainable AI, Natural Language Processing, and Applied Machine Learning. I hold a strong academic background and have contributed to multiple research projects, constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the data science field.

I have been actively looking for research scientist or applied scientist internship positions in Summer 2025. Feel free to reach out if there are any opportunities!

Research Interests

• Explainable AI (XAI): Visual Explanation-Guided Learning, Explanation-Guided Learning with Language Models
• Large Language Model (LLM): Multimodal LLM, LLM Evaluation, LLM Distillation

News

• [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 AGI team 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

Education Experience

	Emory University, 2022.08- Ph.D. in Computer Science
	Columbia University, 2020.09-2021.12 M.S. in Data Science
	Duke University, 2019.08-2020.05 Master of Engineering Management
	Dalian University of Technology, 2015.09-2019.06 B.E. in Engineering Mechanics (Excellence Program)

Internship Experience

	Amazon AGI, 2024.06-2024.09 Research Scientist Intern
	Guotai Junan Securities, 2018.12-2019.03 Equity Research Intern
	China Development Bank, 2018.01-2018.03 Risk Management Intern

Services

Journal Reviewers

• ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
• IEEE Transactions on Big Data
• IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
• Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics

Conference Reviewers/Program Committee

• ICLR 2025
• CVPR 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

Softwares

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