Yifei Dong I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, advised by Prof. Zhi-Qi Cheng. I also work closely with Dr. Qi Dai and Prof. Alexander G. Hauptmann. I received my M.S. from Columbia University and my B.S. from the University of Glasgow. My research interests include embodied AI, world models, vision-and-language navigation, and multimodal large language models. Email  /  CV  /  Google Scholar  /  GitHub  /  LinkedIn

• [10/2026] - Recognized as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS 2026.
• [09/2026] - One paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2026 as an Oral presentation.
• [09/2026] - We are organizing the RoboWorld Challenge 2026 with RoboPAD at NeurIPS 2026.
• [07/2026] - Received a DEI Travel Grant for ECCV 2026.
• [07/2026] - Received IEEE RAS travel support for IROS 2026.
• [06/2026] - One paper was accepted to ECCV 2026.
• [06/2026] - One paper was accepted to IROS 2026.
• [04/2026] - One paper was accepted to Findings of ACL 2026.
• [12/2025] - One paper was presented as an Oral at NeurIPS 2025.
• [11/2025] - One paper was accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2025.
• [09/2025] - Received the Carwein-Andrews PhD Fellowship at the University of Washington.
• [09/2025] - Started my Ph.D. at the University of Washington.
• [06/2025] - One paper won a Best Paper Award at the Anti-UAV Workshop at CVPR 2025.
• [04/2025] - Received the Top Scholar Award from the University of Washington.
• [12/2024] - One paper was presented as a Spotlight at NeurIPS 2024.
• [11/2024] - One paper was named an Outstanding Paper Finalist and presented as an Oral at EMNLP 2024.

	Language-Conditioned World Modeling for Visual Navigation Yifei Dong*, Fengyi Wu*, Yilong Dai, Lingdong Kong, Guangyu Chen, Yetong Sha, Qiyu Hu, Feng Liu, Siyu Huang, Qi Dai, Zhi-Qi Cheng * Equal Contribution NeurIPS, 2026 Oral · Top 0.36% of submissions (112 / 30,709) paper  /  code  /  dataset
	Towards Unified World Models for Visual Navigation via Memory-Augmented Planning and Foresight Yifei Dong*, Fengyi Wu*, Guangyu Chen, Lingdong Kong, Xu Zhu, Qiyu Hu, Yuxuan Zhou, Jingdong Sun, Jun-Yan He, Qi Dai, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Zhi-Qi Cheng * Equal Contribution ECCV, 2026 paper  /  code  /  dataset
	HA-VLN 2.0: An Open Benchmark and Leaderboard for Human-Aware Navigation in Discrete and Continuous Environments with Dynamic Multi-Human Interactions Yifei Dong*, Fengyi Wu*, Qi He, Lingdong Kong, Heng Li, Minghan Li, Zebang Cheng, Yuxuan Zhou, Jingdong Sun, Qi Dai, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Zhi-Qi Cheng * Equal Contribution IROS, 2026 paper  /  code  /  project  /  dataset
	GoViG: Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation via Multimodal Reasoning Fengyi Wu*, Yifei Dong*, Yilong Dai, Guangyu Chen, Qifeng Wu, Huiting Huang, Hang Wang, Qi Dai, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Zhi-Qi Cheng * Equal Contribution ACL Findings, 2026 paper  /  code
	Large Language Model Agents in Finance: A Survey Bridging Research, Practice, and Real-World Deployment Yifei Dong*, Fengyi Wu*, Kunlin Zhang, Yilong Dai, Sanjian Zhang, Wanghao Ye, Sihan Chen, Zhi-Qi Cheng * Equal Contribution EMNLP Findings, 2025 paper / code / project
	Securing the Skies: A Comprehensive Survey on Anti-UAV Methods, Benchmarking, and Future Directions Yifei Dong*, Fengyi Wu*, Sanjian Zhang, Guangyu Chen, Yuzhi Hu, Masumi Yano, Jingdong Sun, Siyu Huang, Feng Liu, Qi Dai, Zhi-Qi Cheng * Equal Contribution CVPR Anti-UAV Workshop, 2025 Best Paper Award paper
	Human-Aware Vision-and-Language Navigation: Bridging Simulation to Reality with Dynamic Human Interactions Heng Li*, Minghan Li*, Zhi-Qi Cheng*, Yifei Dong, Yuxuan Zhou, Jun-Yan He, Qi Dai, Teruko Mitamura, Alexander G. Hauptmann * Equal Contribution NeurIPS, 2024 Spotlight paper  /  project
	SHIELD: LLM-Driven Schema Induction for Predictive Analytics in EV Battery Supply Chain Disruptions Zhi-Qi Cheng*, Yifei Dong*, Aike Shi, Wei Liu, Yuzhi Hu, Jason O’Connor, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Kate Whitefoot * Equal Contribution EMNLP, 2024 Oral · Outstanding Paper Finalist paper  /  code
	MaxSup: Overcoming Representation Collapse in Label Smoothing Yuxuan Zhou*, Heng Li*, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Xudong Yan, Yifei Dong, Mario Fritz, Margret Keuper * Equal Contribution NeurIPS, 2025 Oral presentation paper  /  code

Agentic World Modeling: Foundations, Capabilities, Laws, and Beyond Awesome Agentic World Modeling Team arXiv technical report, April 2026 technical report / code / project

University of Washington Research Assistant · MILab September 2025 – Present Advisor: Zhi-Qi Cheng Mentors: Qi Dai, Alexander G. Hauptmann	Carnegie Mellon University Research Assistant October 2022 – July 2025 Mentors: Zhi-Qi Cheng, Qi Dai, Kate Whitefoot, Alexander G. Hauptmann
Graphen, Inc. Data Scientist Intern February 2022 – December 2022 Advisor: Ching-Yung Lin

• Carwein-Andrews PhD Fellowship, University of Washington · 2025–2026
  $15,000 annual stipend; two recipients annually
• Top Scholar Award, UW Graduate School Fund for Excellence and Innovation (GSFEI) · 2025
• Oral Presentation, NeurIPS · 2026 (first author; top 0.36% of submissions)
• Oral Presentation, NeurIPS · 2025 (co-author)
• Top Reviewer, NeurIPS · 2026
• Outstanding Paper Finalist & Oral Presentation, EMNLP · 2024 (top 4.8% of submissions)
• Best Paper Award, CVPR Anti-UAV Workshop · 2025 (one of two recipients)
• DEI Travel Grant, ECCV · 2026
• IEEE RAS Travel Support, IROS · 2026
• Graduate School Conference Presentation Award, University of Washington · 2026
• 1st Place, NIST TRECVID Deep Video Understanding Challenge · 2022 (Oral)

© 2026 Yifei Dong. Template: Jon Barron.