Yifei Yuan

ETH Zurich, yfyuan01@gmail.com

profile.jpg

Swiss Data Science Center

Andreasstrasse 5

ETH Zurich

About me: I am currently a postdoc researcher at Swiss Data Science Center, ETH and an incoming lecturer (assistant professor) at University of Bristol. I also serve as a guest researcher 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 lies broadly in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on LLMs, multimodal AI, and agentic AI. I am interested in developing models that integrate language, vision, and other modalities, and AI agents that interact with users, tools, and dynamic environments.

I also explore real-world and interdisciplinary applications of foundation models, including multimodal conversational systems, social media analysis, information retrieval, and computational social science. More broadly, I am interested in building AI systems that are interpretable, adaptable, reliable, and human-aligned, and in connections between cognitive science and AI.

news

Mar 31, 2026 One paper accepted at TOIS 2026.
Mar 19, 2026 Two papers (1 main + 1 workshop) accepted at ICLR 2026.
Oct 22, 2025 Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2025.
Sep 10, 2025 I’m honored to serve as the publicity co-chair at ECIR 2026.

selected publications

  1. ICLR
    RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding
    Jiaang Li*, Yifei Yuan*, Wenyan Li, and 8 more authors
    ICLR, 2026
  2. EMNLP Findings
    What if Othello-Playing Language Models Could See?
    Xinyi Chen*, Yifei Yuan*, Jiaang Li, and 3 more authors
    EMNLP Findings, 2025
  3. EMNLP Findings
    Summarize-Exemplify-Reflect: Data-driven Insight Distillation Empowers LLMs for Few-shot Tabular Classification
    Yifei Yuan, Jiatong Li, Weijia Zhang, and 3 more authors
    EMNLP Findings, 2025
  4. ICLR Workshop
    Revisiting the Othello World Model Hypothesis
    Yifei Yuan and Anders Søgaard
    ArXiv, 2025
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. 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