Yifan Wang

Phd Student · Smile Lab @ Northeastern University

About

I am a PhD candidate at SMILE Lab @ Northeastern University, supervised by Prof. Yun Raymond Fu . Before that, I obtained my Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and applied mathematics from Shandong university, Jinan, Shandong, China. Currently, I'm also a research intern at Snap Inc. where I'm working closely with Yanyu Li, Anil Kag, Gorden Qian and Sergey Tulyakov, My research currently centers on the RL of the generative models. Also, I have experience of model efficiency and MLLM agent. Feel free to contact for anything! σ`∀´)σ

I'm actively looking for research internship opportunities and collaborations for Spring/Summer 2027!

News

Apr 2026 — One paper got accepted by ACL2026!
Feb 2026 — One paper got accepted by ICLR2026!
Jun 2025 — Begin my internship at Snap.
May 2024 — One paper got accepted by IJCV!
Jan 2024 — One paper got accepted by TCDS!
Sep 2023 — Begin my Phd life at NEU

Publications & Pre-prints

Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning

Yifan Wang, Yanyu Li, Gordon Guocheng Qian, Sergey Tulyakov, Yun Fu, Anil Kag

Under review

Webpage

GmNet: Revisiting Gating Mechanisms From A Frequency View

Yifan Wang, Xu Ma, Yitian Zhang, Yizhou Wang, Zhongruo Wang, Sung-Cheol Kim, Vahid Mirjalili, Vidya Renganathan, Yun Fu

ICLR 2026 poster

PDF · Code

UnAC: Adaptive Visual Prompting with Abstraction and Stepwise Checking for Complex Multimodal Reasoning

Yifan Wang, Yun Fu

ACL 2026 Findings

PDF

Exploiting inter-sample affinity for knowability-aware universal domain adaptation

Yifan Wang, Lin Zhang, Ran Song, Hongliang Li, Paul L Rosin, Wei Zhang

International Journal of Computer Vision

PDF · Code

Neighborhood-aware mutual information maximization for source-free domain adaptation

Lin Zhang, Yifan Wang, Ran Song, Mingxin Zhang, Xiaolei Li, Wei Zhang

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

PDF

Dual-graph contrastive learning for unsupervised person reidentification

Lin Zhang, Ran Song, Yifan Wang, Qian Zhang, Wei Zhang

IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems

PDF

Experience

Research Intern · Creative Vision @ Snap Inc.

May 2025 – Now · Santa Monica, CA, USA

Exploring differentiable reward finetuning for video diffusion model.

Research Assistant · Smile Lab @ NEU

2023 – Present