Yifan Niu

I am a third-year phd student in Data Science and Analytics Thrust at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), advised by Prof. Jia Li and Prof. Yuan Yao. Currently, my research focuses on reinforcement learning and accelerating the training of large-scale multimodal large language models.

I am expected to graduate in June 2026 and will be on the job market. Meanwhile, I am open to collaborations and communications. If you are interested in working with me, please feel free to drop me an email.

Email: yniu669 [at] connect.hkust-gz.edu.cn  /  yniu808 [at] gmail.com

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Publications   (* indicates co-first authors; † indicates correspondence.)
Mini-Game Lifetime Value Prediction in Wechat
Aochuan Chen*, Yifan Niu*, Ziqi Gao*, Yujie Sun, Shoujun Liu, Gong Chen, Yang Liu, Jia Li†
KDD 2025
RelEdit: Evaluating Conceptual Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Relational Reasoning
Yifan Niu*, Miao Peng*, Nuo Chen, Yatao Bian, Tingyang Xu, Jia Li†
ACL 2025 Findings
IBCircuit: Towards Holistic Circuit Discovery with Information Bottleneck
Tian Bian*, Yifan Niu* (co-first authors; alphabetical order), Chaohao Yuan, Chengzhi Piao, Bingzhe Wu, Long-Kai Huang, Yu Rong, Tingyang Xu, Hong Cheng, Jia Li†
ICML 2025
InversionGNN: A Dual Path Network for Multi-Property Molecular Optimization
Yifan Niu, Ziqi Gao, Tingyang Xu, Yang Liu, Yatao Bian, Yu Rong, Junzhou Huang, Jia Li†
ICLR 2025
Chapter: Convolutional Neural Network in Drug Design
Yifan Niu, Tingyang Xu, Jia Li†
Elsevier Book: Deep Learning in Drug Design: Methods and Applications (Publication date: October 1, 2025)
Hierarchical Graph Latent Diffusion Model for Conditional Molecule Generation Optimization
Tian Bian, Yifan Niu, Heng Chang, Divin Yan, Junzhou Huang, Yu Rong, Tingyang Xu†, Jia Li†, Hong Cheng
CIKM 2024
Handling Missing Data via Max-Entropy Regularized Graph Autoencoder
Ziqi Gao, Yifan Niu, Jiashun Cheng, Jianheng Tang, Lanqing Li†, Tingyang Xu, Peilin Zhao, Fugee Tsung, Jia Li†
AAAI 2023
Federated Learning for Face Recognition with Gradient Correction
Yifan Niu, Weihong Deng
AAAI 2022
Under Review
Attacking and Securing Community Detection: A Game-Theoretic Framework
Yifan Niu, Aochuan Chen, Tingyang Xu, Jia Li†
TPAMI Under Revision
Experience

[2022 Dec. - 2024 Oct.] Research Intern.
Tencent AI Lab - Machine Learning Center, Shenzhen. Work with Tingyang Xu, Yu Rong and Yatao Bian.

[2021 Aug. - 2022 Mar.] Research Intern.
SenseTime Group Limited - Urban Computing Group, Beijing. Work with Haoran Wang.

Awards

Meritorious Winner in Mathematical Contest In Modeling (MCM), 2018.

Second Prize in Beijing Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest, 2018.

Third Prize in National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest (NUEDC), 2017.

Third Prize in the 33st National Undergraduate Physics Competition, 2016.

First Prize in Physics Competition of BUPT, 2016.