Yihang Du | Homepage

About Me

Hi! 👋 I am Yihang Du (杜艺航). I am an incoming PhD student at FreedomAI Lab@CUHK-Shenzhen, advised by Prof. Benyou Wang. I earned my Bachelor’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: I’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 Model（Application in Medical AI）

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 Shenzhen, China
Ph.D. student in Computer Science 2026-2031(exp.)

Zhongnan University of Economics and Law Wuhan, China
B.Sc. in Statistics 2022-2026

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

Update

Jan' 26A paper is accepted by Bioinformatics.

Sep' 25I’m excited to join the FreedomAI Lab as an RA for the rest of my undergrad. Enjoy Shenzhen life!

Sep' 25Our paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2025.

Apr' 25Our 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

PDF Code Project Page

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

Preprints

Misc

Here are some of my friends. 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.