Yankai Chen

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher working with Prof. Xue (Steve) Liu and Prof. Philip S. Yu. Previously, I was a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2023, supervised by Prof. Irwin King. Prior to that, I completed my M.S. degree at The University of Hong Kong in 2018, working with Prof. Reynold Cheng, and received my B.S. degree from Nanjing University in 2016, mentored by Prof. Qizhi Liu.

My research interests lie at the intersection of Human-centered AI and Knowledge Mining. I am dedicated to building intelligent systems that can deeply understand massive-scale data and collaborate with humans effectively, efficiently, and trustworthily. My recent research focuses on:

• Agentic AI, including Agent Memory, Deep Research, and Human-Agent Collaboration.
• LLM Personalization, Retrieval-Augmented Generation.

I also work on topics including:

• Optimal Transport theory and Optimization.
• Representation Learning, including Self-supervised Learning, Semi-supervised Learning.
• Large-scale Graph Data Mining, such as Graph Neural Networks, Knowledge Graph, Graph-text Fusion.
• Information Retrieval and Efficiency Optimization, including Dense Retrieval and Low-bit Quantization, with applications in Search and Recommender Systems

Recent Research Highlight

• ConSurv: Multimodal Continual Learning for Survival Analysis
  Dianzhi Yu, Conghao Xiong, Yankai Chen, Wenqian Cui, Xinni Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Hao Chen, Irwin King
  In Proceeding of AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026

• S²Drug: Bridging Protein Sequence and 3D Structure in Contrastive Representation Learning for Virtual Screening
  Bowei He, Bowen Gao, Yankai Chen, Yankai Chen, Yanyan Lan, Chen Ma, Philip S. Yu, Yaqin Zhang, Weiying Ma
  In Proceeding of AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026

• Embracing Trustworthy Brain-Agent Collaboration as Paradigm Extension for Intelligent Assistive Technologies
  Yankai Chen, Xinni Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Yangning Li, Henry Peng Zou, Chunyu Miao, Weizhi Zhang, Xue Liu, Philip S. Yu
  In Proceeding of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

• AdmTree: Compressing Lengthy Context with Adaptive Semantic Trees
  Yangning Li, Shaoshen Chen, Yinghui Li, Yankai Chen, Hai-Tao Zheng, Hui Wang, Wenhao Jiang, Philip S. Yu
  In Proceeding of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

• Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Systems with Large Language Models: A Survey of Recent Advances, Resources, and Future Directions
  Yaozu Wu, Dongyuan Li, Yankai Chen^#, Renhe Jiang, Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yangning Li, Liancheng Fang, Zhen Wang, Philip S. Yu
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (EMNLP Findings), 2025