About

Hi! 👋 I am Yihang Du (杜艺航). I am an incoming PhD student at FreedomAI Lab@CUHK-Shenzhen, advised by Prof. Benyou Wang.

Generally, I am interested in advancing the capabilities and efficiency of Multimodal Language Models (MLLMs) to enable more human-like perception and reasoning.

Collaboration: I’m actively seeking to collaborate on MLLM research. Feel free to drop me an email to discuss, or just for a casual chat.

Update

Jan' 26 A paper is accepted by Bioinformatics.
Sep' 25 I’m excited to join the FreedomAI Lab as an RA for the rest of my undergrad. Enjoy Shenzhen life!
Sep' 25 Our paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
Apr' 25 Our paper is accepted by IJCAI 2025. See you in Guangzhou!

Publications

[Google Scholar] († denotes equal contribution)

  1. A Methodological Framework for Measuring Spatial Labeling Similarity teaser IJCAI
    A Methodological Framework for Measuring Spatial Labeling Similarity
    Yihang Du†, Jiaying Hu†, Suyang Hou, Yueyang Ding, Xiaobo Sun.
    IJCAI 2025
    PDF
  2. CEMUSA: A Graph-based Integrative Metric for Evaluating Clusters in Spatial Transcriptomics teaser Bioinfo.
    CEMUSA: A Graph-based Integrative Metric for Evaluating Clusters in Spatial Transcriptomics
    Jiaying Hu†, Yihang Du†, Suyang Hou, Yueyang Ding, Jinyan Li, Xiaobo Sun, Hao Wu.
    Bioinformatics 2026
    PDF Code Project Page
  3. Causality-Induced Positional Encoding for Transformer-Based Representation Learning of Non-Sequential Features teaser NeurIPS
    Causality-Induced Positional Encoding for Transformer-Based Representation Learning of Non-Sequential Features
    Kaichen Xu, Yihang Du, Mianpeng Liu, Zimu Yu, Xiaobo Sun.
    NeurIPS 2025.
    PDF
  4. Detecting and Dissecting Anomalous Anatomic Regions in Spatial Transcriptomics with STANDS teaser Nat. Commun.
    Detecting and Dissecting Anomalous Anatomic Regions in Spatial Transcriptomics with STANDS
    Kaichen Xu, Yan Lu, Suyang Hou, Kainan Liu, Yihang Du, Mengqian Huang, Hao Feng, Hao Wu, Xiaobo Sun.
    Nature Communications 2024
    PDF

Education

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Ph.D. student in Computer Science
Advisor: Prof. Benyou Wang
Shenzhen, China 2026-2031(exp.)
Zhongnan University of Economics and Law
B.Sc. in Statistics
Wuhan, China 2022-2026

Experience

Shenzhen Loop Area Institute
Research Intern
2026.06 - 2026.08
CUHK-Shenzhen
Research Assistant at FreedomAI Lab
Supervisor: Prof. Benyou Wang and Dr. Yan Hu
2025.08 - 2026.04
Emory University
Research Assistant
Supervisor: Prof. Xiaobo Sun
2025.02 - 2025.08

Misc

Here are some of my friends.

I am a big fan of Podcasts and I enjoy playing table tennis.
I love photography. I capture the beauty of my travels with a SONY A7M4.

At Tower Records in Shibuya, Tokyo
At Tower Records | Shibuya, Tokyo 2025.