About me
I am a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Irwin King (ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, AAAI Fellow). Prior to that, I received my B.Eng. degree in Artificial Intelligence from Qian Xuesen Honors College at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
I am particularly interested in knowledge representation and reasoning, recommender systems, and agentic AI.
I’m still working on something that I can present, and for now, I may just share a quote that I really like.
“Why do we have to listen to our hearts?” the boy asked.
“Because, wherever your heart is, that is where you will find your treasure.”
Any discussion, collaboration, and mentoring (both giving and receiving) are very welcome, and I can be reached at liyifan@link.cuhk.edu.hk.
Publications
Generative Archetype-Grounded Item Representations for Sequential Recommendation
Yifan Li, Jiahong Liu, Xinni Zhang, Hao Chen, Yankai Chen, Wenhao Yu, Jianting Chen, Irwin King. WWW 2026
From Evidence to Trajectory: Abductive Reasoning Path Synthesis for Training Retrieval-Augmented Generation Agents
Muzhi Li, Jinhu Qi, Yihong Wu, Minghao Zhao, Liheng Ma, Yifan Li, Xinyu Wang, Yingxue Zhang, Ho-fung Leung, Irwin King. NeurIPS 2025 Efficient Reasoning Workshop
Download here
RECODE: A Benchmark for Research Code DEvelopment with Interactive Human Feedback
Chunyu Miao, Henry Peng Zou, Yangning Li, Yankai Chen, Yibo Wang, Fangxin Wang, Yifan Li, Wooseong Yang, Bowei He, Xinni Zhang, Dianzhi Yu, Hanchen Yang, Hoang H Nguyen, Yue Zhou, Jie Yang, Jizhou Guo, Wenzhe Fan, Chin-Yuan Yeh, Panpan Meng, Liancheng Fang, Jinhu Qi, Wei-Chieh Huang, Zhengyao Gu, Yuwei Han, Langzhou He, Yuyao Yang, Xue Liu, Irwin King, Philip S. Yu. ICLR 2026
Download here
Teaching
CSCI5640: Natural Language Processing
Teaching Assistant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2026
Graduated-Level Course
CSCI1550: Computer Principles and Python Programming
Teaching Assistant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2025
Undergraduate Course
CSCI2100/ESTR2102: Data Structures
Teaching Assistant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2025
Undergraduate Course
CSCI3160: Design and Analysis of Algorithms
Teaching Assistant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2024
Undergraduate Course