Yunfan Li

Room B316, Colledge of Computer Science,

Sichuan University, Wangjiang Campus, 610065

Hi! My name is Yunfan Li (李云帆). I received my Ph.D. degree in 2025 from the College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, under the supervision of Professor Peng [Website]. Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the College of Computer Science, Sichuan University. My research interests include clustering, unsupervised learning, and AI for Science.

News

Sep 19, 2025	One paper was accepted by the 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems as Spotlight [NeurIPS-25], which will take place on Dec 10-15, 2024, San Diego Convention Center, California, United States.
Jun 26, 2025	One paper was accepted by the International Conference on Computer Vision 2025 [ICCV-25], which will take place on Oct 19 – 23th, 2025, Honolulu, Hawai’i, United States.
Jun 16, 2025	I have been invited to be a Reviewer for Pattern Recognition [PR].
Apr 29, 2025	One paper was accepted by the 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence [IJCAI-25], which will take place on August 16-22, 2025, Montreal.
Feb 7, 2025	I was invited to present a talk at the AI for Life Science Seminar [AI4LifeScience], which will take place on February 23, 2025, in UESTC, Chengdu, China.
Jan 31, 2025	One paper was accepted by Nature Communications [NatComm-25], 2025.
Sep 26, 2024	One paper was accepted by the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems [NeurIPS-24], which will take place on Dec 10-15, 2024, Vancouver Convention Center, Vancouver, Canada.
Jul 3, 2024	I have been invited to be a Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing [TIP].
May 2, 2024	One paper was accepted by the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning as Oral [ICML-24], which will take place on July 21-27, 2024, Messe Wien Exhibition Congress Center, Vienna, Austria.
Apr 14, 2024	I have been invited to be a PC member for the 32nd ACM Multimedia Conference [ACMMM-24], which will take place on October 28-November 1, 2024, Melbourne, Australia.
Mar 13, 2024	One paper was accepted by IEEE Conference on Multimedia Expo [ICME-24], which will take place on July 15-19, 2024, Niagra Falls, Canada.
Feb 28, 2024	One paper was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing [TIP-24], 2024.
Jan 17, 2024	I have been invited to be a PC member for the European Conference on Computer Vision [ECCV-24], which will take place on September 29-October 4, 2024, MiCo Milano, Milan, Italy.
Jan 16, 2024	One paper was accepted by the 12th International Conference on Learning Representations [ICLR-24], which will take place on May 7-11, 2024, Messe Wien Exhibition and Congress Center, Vienna, Austria.
Dec 1, 2023	Honored to win Gold Prize (Ranked 6/1097) in NeurIPS 2023 Competion - Single-Cell Perturbations [Link].
Nov 27, 2023	I have been invited to be a Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence [TPAMI].
Nov 23, 2023	Honored to win the Sichuan University Tecent Scholarship (Special Grade).
Oct 19, 2023	I have been invited to be a Reviewer for BMC Bioinformatics [BMCBioinform].
Sep 12, 2023	I have been invited to be a PC member for the International Conference on Pattern Recognition [ICPR-24], which will take place on December 1-5, 2024, Kolkata, India.
Sep 8, 2023	One paper was accepted by Nature Communications [NatComm-23], 2023.
Apr 20, 2023	One paper was accepted by the 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence [IJCAI-23], which will take place on Augest 19-25, 2023, Macao, S.A.R.

Selected Publications

2025

NatComm

MetaQ: fast, scalable and accurate metacell inference via single-cell quantization

Yunfan Li, Hancong Li, Yijie Lin, Dan Zhang, Dezhong Peng, Xiting Liu, Jie Xie, Peng Hu, Lu Chen, Han Luo, and others

Nature Communications, 2025

Bib PDF Code

@article{Li_NatComm2025_MetaQ,
  title = {MetaQ: fast, scalable and accurate metacell inference via single-cell quantization},
  author = {Li, Yunfan and Li, Hancong and Lin, Yijie and Zhang, Dan and Peng, Dezhong and Liu, Xiting and Xie, Jie and Hu, Peng and Chen, Lu and Luo, Han and others},
  journal = {Nature Communications},
  volume = {16},
  number = {1},
  pages = {1205},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Nature Publishing Group UK London},
}

2024

ICML

Image Clustering with External Guidance

Yunfan Li, Peng Hu, Dezhong Peng, Jiancheng Lv, Jianping Fan, and Xi Peng

International Conference on Machine Learning (Oral), 2024

Bib PDF Code

@article{Li_ICML2024_TAC,
  title = {Image Clustering with External Guidance},
  author = {Li, Yunfan and Hu, Peng and Peng, Dezhong and Lv, Jiancheng and Fan, Jianping and Peng, Xi},
  journal = {International Conference on Machine Learning (Oral)},
  year = {2024},
}

2023

NatComm

scBridge embraces cell heterogeneity in single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq data integration

Yunfan Li*, Dan Zhang*, Mouxing Yang, Dezhong Peng, Jun Yu, Yu Liu, Jiancheng Lv, Lu Chen, and Xi Peng

Nature Communications, 2023

Bib PDF Code

@article{Li_NatComm2023_scBridge,
  title = {scBridge embraces cell heterogeneity in single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq data integration},
  author = {Li*, Yunfan and Zhang*, Dan and Yang, Mouxing and Peng, Dezhong and Yu, Jun and Liu, Yu and Lv, Jiancheng and Chen, Lu and Peng, Xi},
  journal = {Nature Communications},
  volume = {14},
  number = {1},
  pages = {6045},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {Nature Publishing Group UK London},
}

2021

AAAI

Contrastive Clustering

Yunfan Li, Peng Hu, Zitao Liu, Dezhong Peng, Joey Tianyi Zhou, and Xi Peng

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021

Bib PDF Code

@article{Li_AAAI2021_CC,
  title = {Contrastive Clustering},
  author = {Li, Yunfan and Hu, Peng and Liu, Zitao and Peng, Dezhong and Zhou, Joey Tianyi and Peng, Xi},
  journal = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  volume = {35},
  number = {10},
  pages = {8547--8555},
  year = {2021},
}