Yifei Yuan

Swiss Data Science Center

Wasserwerkstrasse 10

ETH Zurich

About me: I am currently a postdoc researcher at Swiss Data Science Center, ETH (working closely with EPFL and UZH). I also serve as a guest researcher (previously as a postdoc) at Coastal NLP group at University of Copenhagen. Previously, I obtained my PhD degree at CUHK text mining group, supervised by Prof.Lam Wai in 2023.

Research: My research interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing and information retrieval, with a particular emphasis on social science applications and multimodal analysis involving both text and images. My key areas of focus include social media mining, multimodal conversational systems, agentic AI, political NLP, and broader topics across the NLP and IR landscape. I’m also very interested in cognitive science and its intersections with artificial intelligence, particularly in understanding how human cognition can inform the development of more interpretable, adaptable, and human-aligned AI systems.

Should you be interested in any of these topics, I’m more than happy to have a chat:)

news

May 12, 2025	One paper accepted at ICLR World Model workshop.
Apr 17, 2025	Our tutorial “Query Understanding in LLM-based Conversational Information Seeking” accepted at both SIGIR and WWW.
Nov 15, 2024	Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2024.

selected publications

arxiv

RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding

Jiaang Li^*, Yifei Yuan^*, Wenyan Li, and 8 more authors

ArXiv, 2025

Bib PDF

@article{Li2025RAVENEAAB,
  journal = {ArXiv},
  title = {RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding},
  author = {Li, Jiaang and Yuan, Yifei and Li, Wenyan and Aliannejadi, Mohammad and Hershcovich, Daniel and S{\o}gaard, Anders and Vuli'c, Ivan and Zhang, Wenxuan and Liang, Paul Pu and Deng, Yang and Belongie, Serge},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:278769446},
  show_bib = {true}
}

ICLR Workshop

Revisiting the Othello World Model Hypothesis

Yifei Yuan and Anders Søgaard

ArXiv, 2025

Bib PDF

@article{Yuan2025RevisitingTO,
  title = {Revisiting the Othello World Model Hypothesis},
  author = {Yuan, Yifei and Søgaard, Anders},
  journal = {ArXiv},
  year = {2025},
  volume = {abs/2503.04421},
  url = {https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:276813578},
}

EMNLP

Unlocking Markets: A Multilingual Benchmark to Cross-Market Question Answering

Yifei Yuan, Yang Deng, Anders Søgaard, and 1 more author

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2024

Bib PDF

@article{Yuan2024UnlockingMA,
  title = {Unlocking Markets: A Multilingual Benchmark to Cross-Market Question Answering},
  author = {Yuan, Yifei and Deng, Yang and Søgaard, Anders and Aliannejadi, Mohammad},
  journal = {Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:272832066},
}

WWW

Asking Multimodal Clarifying Questions in Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search

Yifei Yuan, Clemencia Siro, Mohammad Aliannejadi, and 2 more authors

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024, 2024

Bib PDF

@article{Yuan2024AskingMC,
  title = {Asking Multimodal Clarifying Questions in Mixed-Initiative Conversational Search},
  author = {Yuan, Yifei and Siro, Clemencia and Aliannejadi, Mohammad and de Rijke, Maarten and Lam, Wai},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:267627964},
}

LREC-COLING

CO3: Low-resource Contrastive Co-training for Generative Conversational Query Rewrite

Yifei Yuan, Chen Shi, Runze Wang, and 5 more authors

COLING, 2024

Bib PDF

@article{Yuan2024CO3LC,
  title = {CO3: Low-resource Contrastive Co-training for Generative Conversational Query Rewrite},
  author = {Yuan, Yifei and Shi, Chen and Wang, Runze and Chen, Liyi and Hu, Renjun and Zhang, Zengming and Jiang, Feijun and Lam, Wai},
  journal = {COLING},
  year = {2024},
  volume = {abs/2403.11873},
  url = {https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:268531326},
}

EMNLP

McQueen: a Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Query Rewrite

Yifei Yuan, Chen Shi, Runze Wang, and 4 more authors

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2022

Bib PDF

@article{Yuan2022McQueenAB,
  title = {McQueen: a Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Query Rewrite},
  author = {Yuan, Yifei and Shi, Chen and Wang, Runze and Chen, Liyi and Jiang, Feijun and You, Yuan and Lam, Wai},
  journal = {Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2022},
  volume = {abs/2210.12775},
  url = {https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:253098774},
}

WSDM

Sentiment Analysis of Fashion Related Posts in Social Media

Yifei Yuan and Wai Lam

Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, 2021

Bib PDF

@article{Yuan2021SentimentAO,
  title = {Sentiment Analysis of Fashion Related Posts in Social Media},
  author = {Yuan, Yifei and Lam, Wai},
  journal = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining},
  year = {2021},
  url = {https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:244117093},
}

SIGIR

Conversational Fashion Image Retrieval via Multiturn Natural Language Feedback

Yifei Yuan and Wai Lam

Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2021

Bib PDF

@article{Yuan2021ConversationalFI,
  title = {Conversational Fashion Image Retrieval via Multiturn Natural Language Feedback},
  author = {Yuan, Yifei and Lam, Wai},
  journal = {Proceedings of the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval},
  year = {2021},
  url = {https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:235368051},
}