XIFENG YAN

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Professor
Venkatesh Narayanamurti Chair
Computer Science Department
University of California at Santa Barbara

Ph.D. (2006)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Curriculum Vitae [PDF] [Short Bio]

Affiliation: IEE, INARC, NS-CTA, and ICB

Computer Science Department
Rm 2017, Henley Hall
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5110

Direction
xyan [at) cs dot ucsb dot edu
Tel: (805) 893-3734
I am a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The primary objective of my research is to explore foundation models in artificial intelligence, leveraging these models for knowledge discovery, and developing cross-disciplinary applications in areas like finance, healthcare, and science.  We have extensively innovated on graph mining, graph data management and pioneered transformer-based time series forecasting.  I am also a co-inventor of ADL/Mica, an agent first approach to conversational AI assistants. 
TEACHING

CS165A: Artificial Intelligence (Fall, 2025)
CS291A: Special Topics in Foundation Models (Spring, 2025)

Previous Courses

News (Oct 2025): I am going to give a keynote talk, "Adaptive Inference in Transformers," [slides] at the 2025 IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025).  This talk will present our recent studies that illustrate and leverage the underutilized computation in Transformer.

News (Oct 2025): I am invited to give an oral spotlight talk (24 among 418 accepted papers), "Adaptive Inference in Pre-trained LLMs: Layer-skipping," at the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) [slides].  The talk is about our recent paper, "Adaptive Layer-skipping in Pre-trained LLMs."[arxiv] [model/code/data].

News (Aug 2025): I was thrilled to give a talk, "Multimodal Language Models for Accelerating Scientific Discovery," at the 6th International Conference on Data-Driven Plasma Science [slides]. It is my first visit to Santa Fe.  This trip is very special to me as reading legendary stories from Los Alamos and articles about complexity science at the Santa Fe Institute during my childhood helped shape my career interests.

News (Aug 2025):  Give a talk and poster at Berkeley Agent AI Summit: "Transforming Agent-based Chatbots with Declarative Programming" [slides][paper]

News (June 2025): The training dataset of our multimodal language model  Open-Qwen2VL released in April has been downloaded 66,000+ times on HuggingFace.  It is a 2B-parameter multimodal language model pre-trained on 0.36% of the 1.4T multimodal tokens used in Qwen2-VL, but outperforms the closed-source Qwen2-VL-2B across various multimodal benchmarks.  [arXiv] [project website] [code] [model] [data]

News Archive
RESEARCH INTERESTS

Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing
RESEARCH PROJECTS  (publications) google scholar | dblp

  • Foundation Models
  • Artificial Intelligence for Finance and Science
  • Multimodal AI Assistants
  • Knowledge Grounded and Controllable Conversational AI (Amazon, PARC)
  • Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare (NSF)
  • Artificial Intelligence for Systems and IoTs
  • Motif Discovery in Massive Protein Sequences (10,000 times faster than MEME)
  • Knowledge Graph Query Processing and Benchmarking (NSF)
  • Graph Information System(NSF)
  • Network Science (ARL)
  • Collaborative Networks (NSF)
    • STUDENTS
    Graduate Students:     Ross Koval, Weizhi Wang, Sirui Zeng, Xuan Luo

    Alumni (PhD):  
    Zekun Li (Google/DeepMind), 2025
    Alon Albalak (SynthLabs), 2024
    Hong Wang (Applied Scientist, Amazon AWS), 2023
    Shiyang Li (Research Scientist, Samsung Research), 2023
    Jing Qian (Research Scientist, Microsoft), 2022
    Zhiyu Chen (Assistant Professor, UT Dallas), 2022
    Xiaoyong Jin (Applied Scientist, Amazon AWS), 2022
    Hanwen Zha (Research Scientist, Facebook Research), 2021
    Wenhu Chen     (Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo), 2021
    Keqian Li     (Research Scientist, Yahoo Research), 2019
    Semih Yavuz (Research Scientist, Salesforce Research), 2019
    Izzeddin Gur     (Research Scientist, Google Research), 2019
    Bay-Yuan Hsu (Assistant Professor, National Tsinghua Univ.), 2019
     Yu Su (Assistant Professor, Ohio State Univ.), 2018
     Honglei Liu     (Research Scientist, Facebook), 2017
    Theodore Georgiou (Google), 2017
         Fangqiu Han (Snapchat), 2016
     Huan Sun (Associate Professor, Ohio State Univ.), 2015
    Bo Zong (NEC Labs America), 2015
     Yang Li (Google), 2015
     Shengqi Yang(Research Scientist, Facebook), 2015
     Arijit Khan     (ETH, now Associate Professor, Aalborg Univ., Denmark), 2013
         Nan Li (oDesk, Apple, now Facebook), 2013
    Gengxin Miao (Google), 2012

     Alumni (PostDoc):
    Shulong Tan     (Baidu Silicon Valley AI Lab), 2015
    Yinghui Wu (Assistant Professor, Washington State Univ.), 2014
    Ying Tang (Associate Professor at Chengdu University of Technology), 2014
    Ziyu Guan (Professor, Northwest University, China), 2012

    Alumni (MS and Collaborators): Marina Zhukova (Linguistics, SocialBot), Rajan Saini (Google, 2023), Aaron Jimenez (Yardi Systems, 2023), Reeva Mishra (Microsoft, 2023,  reevamishra.com), Apoorva Jakalannanavar Halappa Manjula (Roku, 2022), Krishna Gudipati (TruckX, 2021), Benu Changmai (Amazon, 2021), Xiyou Zhou (OctoML, 2020), Yuxiao Zhang (2020), Hongmin Wang(Microsoft, 2020), Mu Xu (Facebook, 2019), Dong-Anh Nguyen (Google, 2017), Tianyu Wu (Google, 2016), Anastasiya Lazareva (Element Analytics, 2016), Alex Morales (UIUC, 2014), Nadav Caspi (Microsoft, 2014), Chen Liu (Oracle, 2013), Matt Weiden (HRL, 2012), Lei Zhao (LinkedIn, 2011), Russell McLoughlin (LLNL, 2010)
    Alumni (Undergraduate):     Xiyue Wang (Columbia, 2023), Xuan Luo (UCSB, 2022), Ari Polakof (Appfolio, GaTech 2022), Nuan Wen (USC, 2019), Yunkai Zhang (UC Berkeley, 2018), Alexander Wood (UCLA, 2014), Lijia Hong (CMU, 2012)
    Alumni (Highschool): Andy Jin (Stanford, 2018)

    HONORS and AWARDS

    1. The 1st place prize for the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5 (SGC5),
      The 2nd place prize for the Alexa Simbot Challenge, 2023
    2. Program Co-chair: 2023 ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD'23) Research Track Program Chair Report Slides.
    3. Test of Time Award at VLDB 2022
    4. Distinguished Paper Award at PLDI 2022
    5. Best of ICDM 2019 Selection
    6. Program Co-chair: 2019 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM'19)
    7. ICDE 2013 Best Poster Award
    8. SIGKDD Best Student Paper Award, 2012
    9. IEEE ICDM 10-year Highest Impact Paper Award, 2011
    10. NSF Career Award, 2010
    11. The Venkatesh Narayanamurti Chair, Univ. of California at Santa Barbara, 2008-present
    12. ACM-SIGMOD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, 2007
    13. Best Student Paper, Proc. of 2007 Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), 2007 
    14. Best Student Paper, Proc. of 2007 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2007
    15. Excellent Teaching Assistant Award, CS Dept., Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003, 2004
    16. Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, CS Dept., SUNY at Stony Brook, 2001
      17.

    Last Modified: July 10, 2022