About Me

Hi! šŸ‘‹ I am Yihang Du (Ꝝč‰ŗčˆŖ). I am an incoming PhD student at FreedomAI Lab@CUHK-Shenzhen, advised by Prof. Benyou Wang. I earned my Bachelorā€™s degree in Statistics from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law.

Previously, I was fortunate to work with Prof. Xiaobo Sun at Emory University and Dr. Yan Hu at CUHK-Shenzhen.

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

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)
  • Unify Modelļ¼ˆApplication in Medical AIļ¼‰

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

Education

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

Experience

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

Update

Jan' 26 A paper is accepted by Bioinformatics.
Sep' 25 Iā€™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] (ā€  denotes equal contribution)

  1. IJCAI
    A Methodological Framework for Measuring Spatial Labeling Similarity
    Yihang Duā€ , Jiaying Huā€ , Suyang Hou, Yueyang Ding, Xiaobo Sun.
    International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence(IJCAI), 2025.
    PDF

  2. Bioinformatics
    CEMUSA: A Graph-based Integrative Metric for Evaluating Clusters in Spatial Transcriptomics
    Jiaying Huā€ , Yihang Duā€ , Suyang Hou, Yueyang Ding, Jinyan Li, Xiaobo Sun, Hao Wu.
    Bioinformatics 2026
    PDF Code Project Page

  3. 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

  4. 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

Preprints

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.