Photo by Yaokun Liu.

Yifan Liu 刘一帆

yifan40 [at] illinois [dot] edu

LinkedIn · GitHub · Google Scholar · CV

Hi! I'm a third-year PhD student in Information Sciences supervised by Prof. Dong Wang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before that, I graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology and a BSc in Computer Science (Hons) from University College London. My research interests are:

Trustworthy and Responsible AI: model alignment and steering (fairness, safety, and privacy); alignment tax.
Multimodality: modality fusion and alignment.
Personalization: user modeling and recommender systems.

Updates

May 2026A paper on cross-module interference in agentic systems has been accepted to the Failure Modes in Agentic AI Workshop at ICML! 🎉
Apr 2026Two papers on generative recommendation and session-based recommendation accepted to SIGIR 2026! 🎉
Jan 2026Two papers on uncertainty estimation and image generation red-teaming accepted to theWebConf 2026!
Nov 2025Journal paper on reasoning-based uncertainty estimation accepted to Knowledge-Based System! 🎉
Aug 2025Paper on designing explanations for misinformation detection accepted to CSCW 2025! 🎉
Jul 2025Paper on unauthorized individual image generation protection accepted to ICCV 2025! 🎉

Preprints

Mitigating the Fairness Steering Tax via Adaptive Inference-time Subspace Intervention

Yifan Liu, Yaokun Liu, Dong Wang

Under review · 2025

Structural Tokenization for Generative Recommendation

Yaokun Liu, Yifan Liu, Zhenrui Yue, Gyuseok Lee, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Dong Wang

Preprint under review · 2025

Selected Publications (See all on Google Scholar)

Learning Decomposed Token Representations for Generative Recommendation

Yifan Liu*, Yaokun Liu*, Zelin Li, Gyuseok Lee, Zhenrui Yue, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang (* equal contribution)

The ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · 2026

[Paper] [Code]

Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection

Yifan Liu, Yaokun Liu, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang

The ACM Web Conference (WWW) · 2025

[Paper] [Code]

Component-Based Fairness in Face Attribute Classification with Bayesian Network-informed Meta Learning

Yifan Liu, Ruichen Yao, Yaokun Liu, Zelin Li, Dong Wang

The ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) · 2025

[Paper] [Code]

Reasoning-Based Uncertainty Estimation for Scalable Multidimensional Media Bias Annotation: A Benchmark Across Diverse Media Spaces

Yifan Liu, Aliya Maussymbayeva, Aslanbek Murzakhmetov, Alexandra Nemerenco, Yike Li, Dong Wang

Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) and International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM-short) · 2025

[Paper] [Code]

Mind the Ambiguity: Aleatoric Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs for Safe Medical Question Answering

Yaokun Liu, Yifan Liu, Phoebe Mbuvi, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Gawon Lim, Dong Wang

The ACM Web Conference (WWW) · 2026

[Paper]

Work Experience

IBM Research

May. 2026 – Aug. 2026

Research Intern

Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

Safety and accountability in AI agent systems.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Sep. 2023 – Present

Ph.D. in Information Sciences

Advisor: Prof. Dong Wang
Georgia Institute of Technology

Sep. 2021 – May 2023

M.S. in Computer Science

Advisor: Prof. Harish Ravichandar
University College London

Sep. 2017 – May 2019

BSc in Computer Science

Advisor: Prof. Mark Herbster

Service

Reviewer: The Web Conference (WWW), SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), IEEE Transactions on Big Data

My Cats 🐾

QiaoQiao

XiangXiang

Qiao & Xiang