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.

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 24, 2026, the projects highlighted below have collectively attracted 18,578 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

Academic Service

  • Area Chair: NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR; Senior Program Committee Member: AAAI.
  • Program Committee Member / Reviewer: CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, SIGGRAPH, WAICA, BMVC, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, AISTATS, WACV and WAICA.
  • Journal Reviewer: International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), and Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR).