About Me
I’m a final-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, advised by Mrinmaya Sachan and Antoine Bosselut. Previously, I completed my MPhil at CUHK and my Bachelor’s at HUST.
I’m currently on the academic job market (2025–2026), seeking tenure-track positions starting Fall 2026/2027. I welcome opportunities for research visits, talks, and collaborations—feel free to reach out!
Research Philosophy
I study how AI systems can perceive the world as humans do and reason in ways we understand. My work focuses on visual language, interpretability, and reasoning. I believe trustworthy AI must be grounded in real-world perception and have transparent internal mechanisms.
Selected Publications
Full list can be found in Google Scholar.
- Can Vision-Language Models Solve Visual Math Equations?
Monjoy Narayan Choudhury*, Junling Wang*, Yifan Hou, Mrinmaya Sachan.
EMNLP 2025 (short)
[paper] [code] [data] - Do Vision-Language Models Really Understand Visual Language?
Yifan Hou, Buse Giledereli, Yilei Tu, Mrinmaya Sachan.
ICML 2025
[paper] [code] [data] - What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis
Jiaoda Li*, Yifan Hou*, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ryan Cotterell.
ACL 2024
[paper] [code] - Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models
Yifan Hou, Jiaoda Li, Yu Fei, Alessandro Stolfo, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guangtao Zeng, Antoine Bosselut, Mrinmaya Sachan.
EMNLP 2023
[paper] [code] [poster] - Mitigating Label Biases for In-context Learning
Yu Fei, Yifan Hou, Zeming Chen, Antoine Bosselut.
ACL 2023
[paper] [code] - Adapters for Enhanced Modeling of Multilingual Knowledge and Text
Yifan Hou, Wenxiang Jiao, Meizhen Liu, Carl Allen, Zhaopeng Tu, Mrinmaya Sachan.
EMNLP 2022 (Findings)
Best Paper at MRL Workshop
[paper] [code] [slides] - What Has Been Enhanced in my Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model?
Yifan Hou, Guoji Fu, Mrinmaya Sachan.
EMNLP 2022 (Findings)
[paper] [code] - Bird's Eye: Probing for Linguistic Graph Structures with a Simple Information-Theoretic Approach
Yifan Hou, Mrinmaya Sachan.
ACL 2021
[paper] [code]
Advising
Selected student mentees:
- Xingzhou Pang — Master Thesis @ ETH Zurich
- Yucheng Wang — Master Thesis @ ETH Zurich
- Yijie Tong — Master Thesis @ UZH
- Ziheng Chi — Master Thesis @ ETH Zurich
- Monjoy N. Choudhury — Master Project @ IIIT Bangalore
- Yilei Tu — Master Project @ ETH Zurich → PhD @ UBC
- Buse Giledereli — Master Thesis @ ETH Zurich → Data Scientist @ Prometeia
- Yu Fei — Master Project @ ETH Zurich → PhD @ UCI
Experience
- Research Intern, Meta AI, Oct 2024 – Feb 2025
- Visiting Researcher, EPFL, Summers 2022 & 2023
- Remote Intern, TTIC, Summer 2020
- Research Intern, NUS, Summer 2019
- Exchange Program, UIUC, Summer 2017
Selected Awards
| Year | Award |
|---|---|
| 2022 | Best Paper Award (MRL Workshop) |
| 2022 | Outstanding Reviewer (ICML) |
| 2022 | SDSC Ph.D. Fellowship (SDSC) |
| 2020 | Faculty Outstanding MPhil Thesis Award (CUHK) |
| 2019 | Student Travel Award (KDD) |
| 2018 | Outstanding Graduates Awards (HUST) |
| 2016 | China National Scholarship (HUST) |
Academic Service
Reviewer for ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLM