Portrait of Yifan Yang

Yifan Yang

Senior Research SDE

About

I am Yifan Yang, a Senior Research SDE at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), based in Shanghai. I joined MSRA in 2021. My research focuses on visual content generation, multimodal foundation models, and general-purpose agentic systems, with a particular emphasis on bridging research innovation, open-source development, and real-world deployment.

I have published over 40 peer-reviewed papers at top-tier venues such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and AAAI, and have filed more than ten international patents. My academic service includes serving as an Area Chair for NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR, and as a Senior Program Committee member for AAAI. I received my bachelor’s degree from Tongji University and my master’s degree from Peking University, and I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I have been deeply involved in the development of Microsoft’s Phi model family, including Phi-3 and Phi-4, with several of my techniques transferred into core Microsoft products, including Office and Azure. My work on LLM2CLIP enhances cross-modal representation learning by leveraging large language models; it has been integrated into the Phi-4-mini pretraining pipeline and received the AAAI 2026 Outstanding Paper Award and the WAIC 2026 Youth Outstanding Paper Nomination Award. My recent research also explores self-evolving agents, commercial visual content generation, video world models, text-to-audio-video generation, and structured multimodal reasoning.

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If you are interested in internship opportunities or research collaborations, feel free to reach out at
📧 yifanyang@microsoft.com

Selected Open-Source Projects

My open-source work spans self-evolving agents, multimodal representation learning, world models, and efficient visual generation. As of August, 2026, the projects highlighted below have collectively attracted 19,000 GitHub stars.

First-author and Corresponding-author Publications

* denotes co-first author; † denotes corresponding author. Publication titles link to arXiv or official publication pages.

Technical Reports and Major Preprints

Collaborative Preprints

Collaborative Publications