Yihang Du | Homepage

About Me

Hi! 👋 I am Yihang Du(杜艺航), an undergraduate student at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, majoring in statistics. I am currently a research assistant at FreedomAI Lab@CUHK-Shenzhen, supervised by Prof. Benyou Wang and Dr. Yan Hu.

I also worked with Prof. Xiaobo Sun from Emory University, and it was a truly life-changing period where I had the privilege to collaborate with talented researchers and learn immensely from them.

Research Interests

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

Efficient Perception through Vision-Language Alignment (Grounding, Multilingual, Representation)
Reasoning via Efficient Multimodal Fusion (Think with Image, Latent Reasoning)

I also have experience in bioinformatics, particularly in omics data, where gene sequences can be viewed as structured language representations.

Education

Zhongnan University of Economics and Law 2022.09 - 2026.06(exp.)
B.Sc. in Statistics

Experience

CUHK-Shenzhen 2025.08 - Present
Research Assistant at FreedomAI Lab, supervisor: Prof. Benyou Wang and Dr. Yan Hu
Emory University 2025.02 - 2025.08
Research Assistant, supervisor: Prof. Xiaobo Sun

News

[2026.01] A paper is accepted by Bioinformatics.
[2025.09] I’m excited to join the FreedomAI Lab as an RA for the rest of my undergrad. Enjoy Shenzhen life!
[2025.09] Our paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
[2025.04] Our paper is accepted by IJCAI 2025. See you in Guangzhou!

Publications

[Google Scholar] († denotes equal contribution)

IJCAI

A Methodological Framework for Measuring Spatial Labeling Similarity

Yihang Du†, Jiaying Hu†, Suyang Hou, Yueyang Ding, Xiaobo Sun.

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence(IJCAI), 2025.

PDF

Bioinformatics

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

Code Project Page in press

NeurIPS

Causality-Induced Positional Encoding for Transformer-Based Representation Learning of Non-Sequential Features

Kaichen Xu, Yihang Du, Mianpeng Liu, Zimu Yu, Xiaobo Sun.

Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems(NeurIPS), 2025.

PDF

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

Misc

Here are some of my friends from ZUEL. While it might not be considered a decent background by some, I met many talented and interesting friends there. Hope for the best for my alma mater. Take a random visit →
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.