Yifei Wang

Yifei Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a part-time Staff Research Scientist at Apple’s Machine Learning Research (MLR) group. Before joining Penn, he worked as a Research Scientist at Apple and previously at Meta AI (FAIR Labs). Wang received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Hong Kong, advised by Victor O.K. Li, where he focused on efficient neural machine translation systems. He also conducted research at the CILVR Lab at New York University under Kyunghyun Cho. His broader research aims to advance AI agents capable of interacting with the physical world by leveraging generative modeling, iterative reasoning, and multi-modal representations spanning language, images, video, and 3D. Wang’s work emphasizes building AI systems that are efficient, flexible, scalable, and knowledgeable, with the goal of creating robust generative world models and decision-making systems that operate reliably in complex, real-world environments.