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. Check out SDL's latest updates on its LinkedIn page. Introduction to Generalization-Aware Compression of Deep Neural Networks. Current PhD students: Zeyu Dong, Zhenhui Ou. Alumni: Yancheng Wang (PhD graduate, now Researcher at Apple), Marko Jojic (M.S. thesis student, now PhD Candidate at UCSD). Recent Publications Yancheng Wang, Ping Li, Dongfang Sun, Yingzhen Yang. Robust Graph Diffusion Model. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2026. [Paper] 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] [Code] Yancheng Wang, Ping Li, Yingzhen Yang. Graph Contrastive Learning with Low-Rank Regularization and Low-Rank Attention for Noisy Node Classification. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2026. [Paper] Yancheng Wang, Nebojsa Jojic, Yingzhen Yang. Learning Informative Attention Weights for Person Re-Identification. Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 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, Ning Xu, Yingzhen Yang. Adaptive Cross-Layer Attention with Informative Key Selection for Image Restoration. Under Major Revision for IJCV, 2026. 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]