Yifan Yang

About

I am Yifan Yang, a Senior Research SDE at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) Shanghai site, where I joined in 2021. My work focuses on visual content generation, multimodal foundation models, and general-purpose agentic systems, bridging research innovation with product-level deployment. I have published 30+ peer-reviewed papers in top venues including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, NeurIPS, and AAAI, and have been deeply involved in the development of Microsoft’s Phi model family (e.g., Phi-3 and Phi-4). Several of my techniques have been transferred into core Microsoft products, including Office and Azure. Our recent work LLM2CLIP improves cross-modal representation learning by incorporating large language models, has been integrated into the Phi-4-mini pretraining pipeline, and received the AAAI 2026 Outstanding Paper Award.

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If you are interested in internship opportunities or research collaborations, feel free to reach out at
📧 yifanyang@microsoft.com

• First-author and Corresponding-author Publications

  (* denotes co-first author, † denotes corresponding author)

  • LLM2CLIP: Powerful Language Model Unlocks Richer Cross-Modality Representation
    Weiquan Huang, Aoqi Wu, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    AAAI 2026 — Outstanding Paper Award  🏆

  • HiTVideo: Hierarchical Tokenizers for Enhancing Text-to-Video Generation with Autoregressive Large Language Models
    Ziqin Zhou, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    AAAI 2026

  • VidGuard-R1: AI-generated Video Detection and Explanation via Reasoning Multimodal Language Models and Reinforcement Learning
    Kyoungjun Park, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    ICLR 2026

  • Zoomer: Adaptive Image Focus Optimization for Black-box Multimodal Large Language Models
    Jiaxu Qian, Chendong Wang, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025

  • Attentive Mask CLIP
    Yifan Yang, et al.
    ICCV 2023

  • ImageBrush: Learning Visual In-Context Instructions for Exemplar-Based Image Manipulation
    Yasheng Sun, Yifan Yang*, et al.
    NeurIPS 2023

  • Directional Self-supervised Learning for Heavy Image Augmentations
    Yalong Bai, Yifan Yang*, et al.
    CVPR 2021

  • VoLUT: Efficient Volumetric Streaming Enhanced by LUT-based Super-resolution
    Chendong Wang, Anlan Zhang, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    MLSys 2025

  • LoRaSC: Expressive and Generalizable Low-rank Adaptation for Large Models via Slow Cascaded Learning
    Siwei Li, Yifan Yang†**, et al.
    EMNLP 2024 (Findings)

  • VIGOR: Reviving Cloud Gaming Sessions
    Zhaoyuan He, Yifan Yang*, et al.*
    ACM CoNEXT 2024

  • Nerve: Real-time Neural Video Recovery and Enhancement on Mobile Devices
    Zhaoyuan He, Yifan Yang*, et al.*
    Proceedings of the ACM on Networking (CoNEXT), 2024

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  Technical Reports and Major Preprints (First / Corresponding Author)

  • Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone
    Marah Abdin, Sam Ade Jacobs, et al., Yifan Yang
    arXiv Technical Report, 2024

  • Phi-4-mini Technical Report: Compact yet Powerful Multimodal Language Models via Mixture-of-LoRAs
    Abdelrahman Abouelenin, Atabak Ashfaq, et al., Yifan Yang
    arXiv Technical Report, 2025

  • ReasonGen-R1: Chain-of-Thought for Autoregressive Image Generation Models through Supervised Fine-tuning and Reinforcement Learning
    Yu Zhang, Yunqi Li, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    arXiv:2505.24875, under review at CVPR 2026

  • Video-in-the-loop: Span-grounded Long Video QA with Interleaved Reasoning
    Chendong Wang, Donglin Bai, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    Under review at ICLR 2026

  • Region-adaptive Sampling for Diffusion Transformers
    Ziming Liu, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    arXiv:2502.10389, under review at CVPR 2026

  • AdaNav: Adaptive Reasoning with Uncertainty for Vision-Language Navigation
    Xin Ding, Jianyu Wei, Yifan Yang, et al.
    arXiv:2509.24387, 2025

  • Diffusion²: Turning 3D Environments into Radio Frequency Heatmaps
    Kyoungjun Park, Yifan Yang†, et al.
    arXiv preprint, 2025

    Collaborative Publications

• • Unified Medical Image Pre-training in Language-Guided Common Semantic Space
    Xiaoxuan He, Yifan Yang, et al.
    ECCV 2024

  • StreamMind: Unlocking Full Frame-rate Streaming Video Dialogue through Event-gated Cognition
    Xin Ding, Hao Wu, Yifan Yang, et al.
    ICCV 2025

  • Efficient and Adaptive Diffusion Model Inference through Lookup Tables on Mobile Devices
    Qipeng Wang, Shiqi Jiang, Yifan Yang, et al.
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 2025

  • Online Video Quality Enhancement with Spatial-Temporal Look-up Tables
    Zefan Qu, Xinyang Jiang, Yifan Yang, et al.
    ECCV 2025

  • ProLongVid: A Simple but Strong Baseline for Long-context Video Instruction Tuning
    Rui Wang, Bohao Li, Yifan Yang, et al.
    EMNLP 2025

  • MageBench: Bridging Large Multimodal Models to Agents
    Miaosen Zhang, Qi Dai, Yifan Yang, et al.
    WACV 2025

  • Reducio! Generating 1K Video within 16 Seconds Using Extremely Compressed Motion Latents
    Rui Tian, Qi Dai, Yifan Yang, et al.
    ICCV 2025

  • AdaNav: Adaptive Reasoning with Uncertainty for Vision-Language Navigation
    Xin Ding, Jianyu Wei, Yifan Yang, et al.
    arXiv preprint, 2025

  • Expand Heterogeneous Learning Systems with Selective Multi-Source Knowledge Fusion
    Gengyuan Dai, Hongxu Xu, Yifan Yang, et al.
    AAAI 2026

  • Empowering Agentic Video Analytics Systems with Video Language Models
    Yuxuan Yan, Shiqi Jiang, Yifan Yang, et al.
    USENIX NSDI 2025

  • DreamDistribution: Learning Prompt Distribution for Diverse In-distribution Generation
    Brian Nlong Zhao, Yifan Yang, et al.
    ICLR 2025

  • Understanding and Improving Training-free Loss-based Diffusion Guidance
    Yifei Shen, Xinyang Jiang, Yifan Yang, et al.
    NeurIPS 2024

  • Online Video Super-resolution with Convolutional Kernel Bypass Grafts
    Jun Xiao, Xinyang Jiang, Yifan Yang, et al.
    IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2023