Hi! I am a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, working with Professors Serena Yeung-Levy, Ludwig Schmidt, and Emma Lundberg. Previously, I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and my B.E. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.
I am on the job market this year (2025-2026).
Research
My research focuses on the foundations of multimodal machine learning (e.g., vision and language) and its applications to science (e.g., computational cell biology). My recent works explore:
- Embedding-based multimodal foundation models (ICLR'24, ICLR'23, NeurIPS'22)
- Generative multimodal foundation models (NeurIPS'24, EMNLP'24, ACL'23)
- Agentic/compounding systems (CVPR'25, CVPR'24, ECCV'24)
- Generative models for science (ICML'25, NEJM AI'24, npj Digital Medicine'19)
News
- 10/2025: Received my Ph.D. degree from Stanford University and started as a postdoctoral scholar. Huge thanks to my advisors and committee members: Professors Serena Yeung-Levy, Ludwig Schmidt, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Emma Lundberg, and John Cioffi!
- 09/2025: Honored to be selected as one of the Rising Stars in Data Science.
- 08/2025: Our study about CLIP vs DINO & Code Equivalence Checking are accepted to EMNLP 2025, and Multimodal Symbolic Reasoning is accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
- 07/2025: Presented CellFlux at ICML 2025. Thanks Citadel for providing the travel grant!
- 06/2025: Honored to be selected as one of the participants in CVPR 2025 Doctoral Consortium. Also excited to host DCVLR: Data Curation for Vision Language Reasoning challenge at NeurIPS 2025.
- 05/2025: Our latest advance in virtual cell modeling (a.k.a. world model for cells), CellFlux (formerly CellFlow), has been accepted to ICML 2025. NegVQA has been accepted to ACL 2025 Findings.
- 04/2025: Three papers presented at ICLR 2025: VLM Interpretability, VidDiff, Inverse Scaling.
- 03/2025: Three papers accepted to CVPR 2025: AutoConverter, MicroVQA, BIOMEDICA. We are organizing DataWorld Workshop at ICML 2025.
- 02/2025: Introduce CellFlow, a flow-matching based method for cellular morphology prediction. We are organizing XAI4CV Workshop at CVPR 2025, MMFM-BIOMED Workshop at CVPR 2025, XLLM Workshop at ACL 2025.
- 01/2025: Introduce AutoConverter, an agentic framework to convert open-ended VQA questions into the multiple-choice format. VidDiff accepted to ICLR 2025, VLM Interpretability accepted to ICLR 2025 Blog Track.
- 12/2024: Two papers presented at NeurIPS 2024 and two at ML4H 2024.
- 11/2024: Our work is selected as an oral presentation (198/6105) at EMNLP 2024! Also selected as one of NeurIPS 2024 Top Reviewers and EMNLP 2024 Outstanding Reviewers.
- 10/2024: VLMClassifier is accepted to NeurIPS 2024; Micro-Bench is accepted to NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks Track.
- 09/2024: Our work analyzing pre-trained language models for image generation is accepted to EMNLP 2024 main conference.
- 07/2024: VideoAgent is accepted to ECCV 2024; AI scientific feedback is published in NEJM AI.
- 06/2024: Our new work investigates why visually-grounded language models are bad at the basic image classification task.
- 05/2024: Selected as a Citadel GQS Fellowship finalist and gave a talk in Chicago.
- 04/2024: VisDiff is selected as an oral presentation (90/11532) at CVPR 2024!
- 03/2024: Introduce VideoAgent, where we leverage a large language model as an agent for long-form video understanding.
- 02/2024: VisDiff accepted to CVPR 2024.
- 01/2024: ICLR 2024: C3 explains the geometry in multi-modal contrastive representation space and introduces a three-step method to bridge the modality gap.
- 12/2023: Introduce VisDiff, an algorithm that automatically describes differences between two image sets, joint work with Berkeley AI Research!
- 11/2023: Honored to be selected as one of NeurIPS 2023 Top Reviewers.
- 10/2023: Large language models generate scientific feedback, answer moral and causal questions, show inverse scaling on 11 tasks.
- 05/2023: Larger language models are not necessarily better on all the tasks. Check our work in ACL 2023 Findings!
- 01/2023: Can you diagnose and rectify a vision model using language inputs? Check our work in ICLR 2023!
- 11/2022: We won the 3rd prize in the first-round Inverse Scaling Prize! Also check out HELM that holistically evaluates language models.
- 10/2022: Honored to receive a NeurIPS 2022 Scholar Award. Thank you NeurIPS organizers!
- 10/2022: Two more works will be presented in ML4H and NeurIPS 2022!
- 09/2022: Our work studying the modality gap accepted to NeurIPS 2022!
- 07/2020: Stanza now supports biomedical and clinical text processing!
- 03/2020: Announce Stanza: A Python NLP Library for Many Human Languages! Star
- 05/2019: Selected as the best oral presentation at 36th Tsinghua CS Forum for Graduate Students!
- 04/2019: How to infer thousands of diagnoses from EHRs? Check our paper in npj (Nature) Digital Medicine!
- 12/2018: Awarded the SenseTime Scholarship (USD 3,000). Thanks SenseTime Inc.!
- 10/2018: Awarded highly selective National Scholarship!
- 06/2018: Received Tsinghua Research Fellowship with a funding of 7,500 USD!
Selected Publications
Awards
Services
Area Chair: NeurIPS 2025, ACL 2025, EMNLP 2025
Reviewer: NeurIPS 2022-2024, ICML 2023-2025, ICLR 2024-2025, CVPR 2025, ICCV 2025, ACL 2020-2024, EMNLP 2020-2024, NAACL 2021-2024, COLM 2024, TPAMI 2023, Scientific Reports 2023
DCVLR: Data Curation for Vision Language Reasoning @ NeurIPS 2025, DataWorld: Unifying Data Curation Frameworks Across Domains @ ICML 2025, The 4th Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) Workshop @ CVPR 2025, Multimodal Foundation Models for Biomedicine: Challenges and Opportunities @ CVPR 2025, The 1st Joint Workshop on Large Language Models and Structure Modeling (XLLM) @ ACL 2025
CS 224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, CS 271: Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
Student Research Workshop Mentor @ ACL 2025, Student-Applicant Support Program @ Stanford 2021-2024, Highschool Outreach Program @ CVPR 2022
I'm very fortunate to have worked with the following talented undergrads for ≥6 months:
Elaine Sui (Class of 2024): Stanford CS MS → Stanford CS PhD w/ SoE Fellowship
Yuchang Su (Class of 2025): Tsinghua CS Undergrad → Harvard AI in Medicine PhD w/ Fellowship
Rui Li (Class of 2025): USTC CS Undergrad w/ Highest Honor → Stanford CS PhD
Sahithi Ankireddy (Class of 2025): Caltech CS Undergrad → Stanford CS MS w/ NSF GRFP Fellowship
Yiming Liu (Class of 2027): Tsinghua CS Undergrad
Miscellaneous
I enjoy reading books. Some of my favorites: To Live (Hua Yu), Walden (Henry David Thoreau), Principles of Economics (N. Gregory Mankiw). I enjoy hiking, jogging, and swimming. I am a fan of classical music, and I was fortunate to learn basics about how to play the guitar, piano, and pipa at Tsinghua University.