Yifan Liu
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

  • Two papers on generative recommendation and session-based recommendation accepted to SIGIR 2026! 🎉
  • Two papers on uncertainty estimation and image generation red-teaming accepted to theWebConf 2026!
  • Journal paper on reasoning-based uncertainty estimation accepted to Knowledge-Based System! 🎉
  • Paper on designing explanations for misinformation detection accepted to CSCW 2025! 🎉
  • Paper on unauthorized individual image generation protection accepted to ICCV 2025! 🎉
  • Paper on face component fairness accepted to ACM FAccT 2025! 🎉

Preprints

Mitigating the Fairness Steering Tax via Adaptive Inference-time Subspace Intervention
Yifan Liu, Dong Wang
Ongoing · 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

Learning Decomposed Token Representations for Generative Recommendation

Yifan Liu*, Yaokun Liu*, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang (* equal contribution)
The ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval · 2026
[Paper]
Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection

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

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

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
[Code] [Paper]
Mind the Ambiguity: Aleatoric Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs for Safe Medical Question Answering

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]

Education

  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
    Ph.D. in Information Sciences
    Sep. 2023 – Present
  • Georgia Institute of Technology
    M.S. in Computer Science
    Sep. 2021 – May 2023
  • University College London
    BSc in Computer Science
    Sep. 2017 – May 2019

Service

  • Reviewer: The Web Conference (WWW), AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), IEEE Transactions on Big Data

My Cats 🐾

QiaoQiao
QiaoQiao
XiangXiang
XiangXiang
Qiao & Xiang
Qiao & Xiang