Portrait of Yifan Liu

Yifan Liu 刘一帆

yifan40 [at] illinois [dot] edu
LinkedIn GitHub Scholar CV

I'm a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Dong Wang. I previously earned an M.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and a BSc (Hons) from UCL. I am always happy to discuss my research and explore potential collaborations, so please feel free to reach out if our interests overlap.

Research interests

  1. LLM & Agent Safety

    Misalignment auditing & mitigation; fairness & alignment interventions; uncertainty quantification in LLMs & multi-agent systems.

    Agent auditing preprint ’26 Fairness preprint ’26 EMNLP ’26 WWW ’26 FAccT ’25 KBS ’25
  2. Personalization & Generative Retrieval

    User modeling & representation learning; personalized language models; generative recommendation & retrieval.

    SIGIR ’26 RecSys ’26

I am seeking U.S.-based research internships for Summer 2027, with a focus on LLM, Agentic AI, and safety.

News

  • One dataset and evaluation track paper and one workshop paper were accepted to NeurIPS 2026! 🎉
  • A paper on uncertainty quantification for LLM MAS has been accepted to EMNLP (Main) 2026! 🎉
  • A paper on generative recommendation and item tokenization has been accepted to ACM RecSys 2026! 🎉
  • Started a research internship at IBM Research. 👁️🐝𝐌
  • A paper on cross-module interference in agentic systems has been accepted to the Failure Modes in Agentic AI Workshop at ICML! 🎉
  • Two papers on generative recommendation and session-based recommendation were accepted to SIGIR 2026! 🎉
  • Two papers on uncertainty estimation and image-generation red-teaming were accepted to WWW 2026!
  • A journal paper on reasoning-based uncertainty estimation was accepted to Knowledge-Based Systems! 🎉
  • A paper on designing explanations for misinformation detection was accepted to CSCW 2025! 🎉
  • A paper on unauthorized individual image-generation protection was accepted to ICCV 2025! 🎉
  • A paper on face-component fairness was accepted to ACM FAccT 2025! 🎉
  • A paper on multimodal interactive MoE for fake news detection was accepted to WWW 2025! See you in Sydney! 🎉
  • Released a new dataset for multidimensional media bias.
  • A paper on retrieval-augmented fact verification was accepted to Findings of ACL 2024!
  • Started my PhD at UIUC!

Work Experience

  • IBM Research
    May 2026 – Aug 2026
    Research Intern
    Yorktown Heights, NY, USA
    Attributing and explaining LLM agent actions for safety and accountability.

Publications

Auditing Agent Actions through Query-Conditioned Attribution

Yifan Liu, Praveen Venkateswaran, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Dong Wang
Safety Preprint, under review 2026
Paper

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

Yifan Liu, Yaokun Liu, Ching-Yu Lin, Daniel Yue Zhang, Ruichen Yao, Zelin Li, Mano Paul, Rahul Gupta, Dong Wang
Safety Fairness Preprint, under review 2026

PropUQ-MAS: Propagation-Aware Uncertainty Quantification for LLM Multi-Agent Systems

Yaokun Liu*, Yifan Liu*, Daniel Yue Zhang, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Dong Wang (* equal contribution)
Safety EMNLP 2026
Paper Code

Learning Decomposed Contextual Token Representations from Pretrained and Collaborative Signals for Generative Recommendation

Yifan Liu*, Yaokun Liu*, Zelin Li, Zhenrui Yue, Gyuseok Lee, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang (* equal contribution)
RecSys SIGIR 2026
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
Fairness KBS 2025 & ASONAM 2024
Paper Code

Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection

Yifan Liu, Yaokun Liu, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
Safety Multimodality WWW 2025
Paper Code

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

Yifan Liu, Ruichen Yao, Yaokun Liu, Ruohan Zong, Zelin Li, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
Fairness FAccT 2025
Paper Code

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

Teaching and Service

Teaching Assistant Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • IS 202: Social Aspects of Information Technology — Facilitated discussion sections and graded coursework.
  • IS 305: Programming for Information Problems — Graded programming assignments and provided feedback.
  • IS 597: Human-Centered Data Science — Designed assignments and delivered concept tutorials.
Reviewer: ACM Web Conference 2025; AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2026, 2027; ACM SIGIR Conference 2026; Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) 2026; IEEE Transactions on Big Data

My Cats 🐾

QiaoQiao
QiaoQiao
XiangXiang
XiangXiang
Qiao & Xiang
Qiao & Xiang
Qiao & Xiang
Qiao & Xiang