🗨 About Me

I am Yifan Shen, a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Previously, I earned my Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I was very fortunate to be advised by Dr. Ismini Lourentzou and Dr. James M. Rehg.

And also work with Dr. Heng Ji, Dr. Gang Wang, Dr. Haohan Wang, Dr. Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, Dr. Aiman Soliman at UIUC.

My professional experience includes internships at Alibaba Group and Hikvision.

Research Interests:

• Multimodal LLM
• Reinforcement Learning
• Healthcare Computer Vision

🧑‍💻 Experience

• 2024.05 - 2024.08, Machine Learning Engineer Intern, Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China.
• 2022.05 - 2022.08, Software Engineer Intern, Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China.
• 2021.05 - 2021.08, Software Engineer Intern, Hikvision, Hangzhou, China.

🌎 Service

• Reviewer for Journal: Neural Networks
• Reviewer for Conference: CVPR 2026, AAAI 2026; COLM 2025
• Workshop Organizer:
• The 5th WACV 2026 Workshop on Large Language and Vision Models for Autonomous Driving (LLVM-AD)
• The 1st WACV 2026 Workshop on Robust and Generalized Lane Topology Understanding and HD Map Generation through CoT Design (TopoCoT)

📝 Publications

Fine-Grained Preference Optimization Improves Spatial Reasoning in VLMs

Yifan Shen, Yuanzhe Liu, Jingyuan Zhu, Xu Cao, Xiaofeng Zhang, Yixiao He, Wenming Ye, James M. Rehg, Ismini Lourentzou.

NeurIPS 2025

What is the Visual Cognition Gap between Humans and Multimodal LLMs?

Xu Cao*, Yifan Shen*, Bolin Lai, Wenqian Ye, Yunsheng Ma, Joerg Heintz, Jintai Chen, Meihuan Huang, Jianguo Cao, Aidong Zhang, James M. Rehg.

COLM 2025

Context Engineering for Trustworthiness: Rescorla Wagner Steering Under Mixed and Inappropriate Contexts

Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian, Yifan Shen, Yanzhou Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Ahmed Abbasi, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang.

EMNLP Main 2025

Towards Adversarially Robust Dataset Distillation by Curvature Regularization

Eric Xue, Yijiang Li, Haoyang Liu, Peiran Wang, Yifan Shen, Haohan Wang.

AAAI 2025

Practical Region-level Attack against Segment Anything Models

Yifan Shen, Zhengyuan Li, Gang Wang.

CVPR 2024 Workshop

Dynamic Microservice Deployment and Offloading for Things–Edge–Cloud Computing

Xianzhong Tian, Huixiao Meng, Yifan Shen, Junxian Zhang, Yuzhe Chen, Yanjun Li.

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Joint DNN partitioning and resource allocation for completion rate maximization of delay-aware DNN inference tasks in wireless powered mobile edge computing

Xianzhong Tian, Pengcheng Xu, Yifan Shen, Yuheng Shao.

Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications