Yifan Niu

I am a fourth-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 parallel computing. I am open to collaborations and communications. If you are interested in working with me, please feel free to drop me an email.

Email: yniu808 [at] gmail.com

Publications (* indicates co-first authors; † indicates correspondence.)

Efficient Scaling of LLM Training with Flexible Context Parallelism
Yifan Niu*, Han Xiao*, Dongyi Liu, Wei Zhou, Jia Li†
NeurIPS 2026

PiCA: Pivot-Based Credit Assignment for Search Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Dongyi Liu*, Yifan Niu*, Qinwen Wang, Han Xiao, Jia Li†
NeurIPS 2026

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation
Ning Li, Zixuan Guo, Yan Xu, Wenbo Fei, Yifan Niu, Chang Luo, Yasheng Wang, Weiwen Liu, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
NeurIPS 2026

Mitigating the Safety Alignment Tax with Null-Space Constrained Policy Optimization
Yifan Niu, Han Xiao, Dongyi Liu, Nuo Chen, Jia Li†
ICLR 2026

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

Preprint

Breaking the Tokenizer Barrier: On-Policy Distillation across Model Families
Yifan Niu, Han Xiao, Dongyi Liu, Zelong Wang, Dihong Gong, Yasheng Wang†, Jia Li†
arXiv 2026

Attacking and Securing Community Detection: A Game-Theoretic Framework
Yifan Niu, Aochuan Chen, Tingyang Xu, Jia Li†
TPAMI Under Revision

Experience

[2026 May - Now] Alibaba - Qwen. Direction: Reasoning & Cowork RL.

[2025 Nov - 2026 Apr] Tencent Fintech - Hunyuan Financial LLM. Direction: On-Policy Distillation.

[2025 Mar - 2025 Oct] Huawei ICT - Ascend AI. Direction: AI Infra.

[2022 Dec - 2024 Oct] Tencent AI Lab - Machine Learning Center. Direction: Graph Learning.

[2021 Aug - 2022 Mar] SenseTime - Urban Computing. Direction: Object Detection.