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Yifei Zhang

Ph.D. Candidate
Emory University
yifei.zhang2 (at) emory.edu


About Me

Welcome! I’m Yifei Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Emory University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Liang Zhao. Before Emory, I received my M.S. degree in Data Science from Columbia University, my B.E. degree in Engineering Mechanics from Dalian University of Technology, and a Master of Engineering Management degree from Duke University.

My research focuses on Explainable AI (XAI), AI Agents, and Large Language Models (LLMs), with particular interests in multimodal learning, model distillation, reasoning, and evaluation. I build methods, agents, and benchmarks that improve the reliability, interpretability, and practical deployment of modern AI systems.

Research Interests

News

  • [May. 2025] I passed my PhD qualifying examination. Thanks to my qualifying committee, Dr. Wei Jin (committee chair), Dr. Xiaofeng Yang, and Dr. Liang Zhao.
  • [May. 2025] One first-author paper Saliency-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Explanations is accepted by KDD 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks Track!
  • [Jan. 2025] I will rejoin Amazon Alexa AI as an Applied Scientist Intern in Boston for Summer 2025.
  • [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 as a Research Scientist Intern at Boston in Summer 2024!
Show earlier news

Selected publications and preprints

  1. EmoLLM: Appraisal-Grounded Cognitive-Emotional Co-Reasoning in Large Language Models teaser
    arXiv
    EmoLLM: Appraisal-Grounded Cognitive-Emotional Co-Reasoning in Large Language Models
    Yifei Zhang, Mingyang Li, Henry Gao, Liang Zhao
    arXiv
    PDF Code

  2. ATOD: An Evaluation Framework and Benchmark for Agentic Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems teaser
    ICLRW'26
    ATOD: An Evaluation Framework and Benchmark for Agentic Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
    Yifei Zhang, Hooshang Nayyeri, Rinat Khaziev, Emine Yilmaz, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Hari Thadakamalla
    ICLR 2026 Workshop on Memory for LLM-Based Agentic Systems
    PDF

  3. Explainable Cross-Disease Reasoning for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment from LDCT teaser
    arXiv
    Explainable Cross-Disease Reasoning for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment from LDCT
    Yifei Zhang, Jiashuo Zhang, Mojtaba Safari, Xiaofeng Yang, Liang Zhao
    arXiv
    PDF

  4. Agentic Commerce: A Survey of How AI Agents Are Reshaping Commerce teaser
    TechRxiv
    Agentic Commerce: A Survey of How AI Agents Are Reshaping Commerce
    Yifei Zhang, Bo Pan, Mengdan Zhu, Jian Pei, Liang Zhao
    TechRxiv
    PDF Page

  5. Cross-modal RAG: Sub-dimensional Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generation teaser
    arXiv
    Cross-modal RAG: Sub-dimensional Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generation
    Mengdan Zhu, Senhao Cheng, Guangji Bai, Yifei Zhang, Liang Zhao
    arXiv
    PDF Code

  6. Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Survey of Resource-Efficient Large Language Models teaser
    arXiv
    Beyond Efficiency: A Systematic Survey of Resource-Efficient Large Language Models
    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
    PDF Page

  7. Saliency-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Explanations teaser
    KDD'25
    Saliency-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Explanations
    Yifei Zhang, James Song, Siyi Gu, Tianxu Jiang, Bo Pan, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao
    The 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2025 (Datasets and Benchmarks Track).
    PDF Page

  8. MEGL: Multimodal Explanation-Guided Learning teaser
    arXiv
    MEGL: Multimodal Explanation-Guided Learning
    Yifei Zhang*, Tianxu Jiang*, Bo Pan, Jingyu Wang, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao (* denotes equal contribution)
    arXiv
    PDF Page

  9. GraphNarrator: Generating Textual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks teaser
    ACL'25
    GraphNarrator: Generating Textual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks
    Bo Pan, Zhen Xiong, Guanchen Wu, Zheng Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Liang Zhao
    The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025.
    PDF

  10. DUE: Dynamic Uncertainty-Aware Explanation Supervision via 3D Imputation teaser
    KDD'24
    DUE: Dynamic Uncertainty-Aware Explanation Supervision via 3D Imputation
    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.
    PDF

  11. Distilling Large Language Models for Text-Attributed Graph Learning teaser
    CIKM' 24
    Distilling Large Language Models for Text-Attributed Graph Learning
    Bo Pan, Zheng Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Yuntong Hu, Liang Zhao
    The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2024.
    PDF

  12. ELAD: Explanation-Guided Large Language Models Active Distillation teaser
    ACL' 24
    ELAD: Explanation-Guided Large Language Models Active Distillation
    Yifei Zhang, Bo Pan, Chen Ling, Yuntong Hu, Liang Zhao
    The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-Findings), 2024.
    PDF Poster

  13. Visual Attention Prompted Prediction and Learning teaser
    IJCAI' 24
    Visual Attention Prompted Prediction and Learning
    Yifei Zhang, Bo Pan, Siyi Gu, Guangji Bai, Meikang Qiu, Xiaofeng Yang, Liang Zhao
    International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2024.
    PDF Page

  14. STES: A Spatiotemporal Explanation Supervision Framework teaser
    SDM' 24
    STES: A Spatiotemporal Explanation Supervision Framework
    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.
    PDF

  15. MAGI: Multi-Annotated Explanation-Guided Learning teaser
    ICCV'23
    MAGI: Multi-Annotated Explanation-Guided Learning
    Yifei Zhang, Siyi Gu, Yuyang Gao, Bo Pan, Xiaofeng Yang, Liang Zhao
    The IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023.
    PDF

  16. ESSA: Explanation Iterative Supervision via Saliency-guided Data Augmentation teaser
    KDD'23
    ESSA: Explanation Iterative Supervision via Saliency-guided Data Augmentation
    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.
    PDF

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, 2025.05-2025.08
Applied Scientist Intern
Amazon, 2024.06-2024.09
Research Scientist Intern
Guotai Junan Securities, 2018.12-2019.03
Equity Research Intern

Services

Journal Reviewer

ACM TIST, IEEE TBD, IEEE TNNLS, JACMP, Expert Systems With Applications, Information Processing and Management, Neurocomputing

Conference Reviewer / Program Committee

ICLR 2025, 2026; CVPR 2025, 2026; ICCV 2025; ECCV 2026; BMVC 2026; ACL ARR; KDD Research Track 2025, 2026; KDD Datasets and Benchmarks Track 2025, 2026; ICLR 2026 Workshop on Memory for LLM-Based Agentic Systems.

Workshop Organizer

Awards


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