Statistical Deep Learning (SDL) Lab General Goal In SDL, we focus on both theoretical foundation of machine learning/deep learning and theory-inspired applications to broad aspects of deep learning, including transformers, graph learning, neural architecture search, model compression/edge computing, and medical imaging, etc. Introduction to Generalization-Aware Compression of Deep Neural Networks. Current PhD students: Yancheng Wang, Zeyu Dong, Zhenhui Ou, Bowen Xi Recent Publications Yancheng Wang, Zeyu Dong, Dongfang Sun, Alvin C Silva, Teresa Wu, Yingzhen Yang. IBMA: Information Bottleneck-Based Multimodal Alignment. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026. [Paper] Yancheng Wang, Osama Hanna, Ruiming Xie, Xianfeng Rui, Maohao Shen, Xuedong Zhang, Christian Fuegen, Jilong Wu, Debjyoti Paul, Arthur Guo, Zhihong Lei, Ozlem Kalinli, Qing He, Yingzhen Yang. VowelPrompt: Hearing Speech Emotions from Text via Vowel-level Prosodic Augmentation. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026. [Paper] Yancheng Wang, Chengshuai Zhao, Dongfang Sun, Huan Liu, Yingzhen Yang. Low-Rank Few-Shot Node Classification by Node-Level Graph Diffusion. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026. [Paper] [Code] Chengshuai Zhao, Zhen Tan, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Yancheng Wang, Yingzhen Yang, Huan Liu. Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2026. [Paper] Yancheng Wang, Changyu Liu, Yingzhen Yang. Diffusion on Graph: Augmentation of Graph Structure for Node Classification. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) 2025. [Paper] [Code] Yancheng Wang, Rajeev Goel, Marko Jojic, Alvin C Silva, Teresa Wu, Yingzhen Yang. Informative Synthetic Data Generation for Thorax Disease Classification. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2025. [Paper] [Code] Yancheng Wang, Yingzhen Yang. Efficient Visual Transformer by Learnable Token Merging. Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2025. [Paper] [Code] Yancheng Wang, Rajeev Goel, Utkarsh Nath, Alvin C Silva, Teresa Wu, Yingzhen Yang. Learning Low-Rank Feature for Thorax Disease Classification. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024. [Paper] [Code] Yancheng Wang, Ping Li, Yingzhen Yang. Visual Transformer with Differentiable Channel Selection: An Information Bottleneck Inspired Approach. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024. [Paper] [Code] Utkarsh Nath, Yancheng Wang, Pavan Turaga, Yingzhen Yang. RNAS-CL: Robust Neural Architecture Search by Cross-Layer Knowledge Distillation. International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) 2024. [Paper] [Code] Utkarsh Nath, Yancheng Wang, Yingzhen Yang. Neural Architecture Search Finds Robust Models by Knowledge Distillation. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2024. [Paper] [Code] Yancheng Wang, Ziyan Jiang, Zheng Chen, Fan Yang, Yingxue Zhou, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Xiaojiang Huang, Yanbin Lu, Yingzhen Yang. RecMind: Large language Model Powered Agent for Recommendation. Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) 2024. [Paper] Utkarsh Nath, Rajeev Goel, Eun Som Jeon, Changhoon Kim, Kyle Min, Yezhou Yang, Yingzhen Yang, Pavan Turaga Deep Geometric Moments Promote Shape Consistency in Text-to-3D Generation. IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2025. [Paper]