Biography

I am a Researcher at RBC Borealis. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 2026, where I was supervised by Prof. Krzysztof Czarnecki. I obtained my master’s degree under the supervision of Prof. Lijun Zhang in the LAMDA Group led by Prof. Zhihua Zhou at Nanjing University. I have also had research experience at Amazon, SONY, Borealis, Tsinghua University with Prof. Jingjing Liu and Prof. Yang Liu, Tencent Lightspeed & Quantum Studios, Alibaba, and Netease Games.

My research focuses on reliable and efficient multimodal foundation models. I study multimodal retrieval, evidence grounding and faithful attribution, and model efficiency and knowledge transfer. My goal is to build models that find relevant information, ground their answers in verifiable evidence, and use computation efficiently.

At RBC Borealis, I work on LLM agent memory and foundation model training.

I am always happy to connect about research opportunities and collaborations in multimodal retrieval, grounding, faithful attribution, and efficient foundation models.

Portrait of Yimu Wang

Yimu Wang
Researcher, RBC Borealis
Ph.D., University of Waterloo

Email Yimu Wang   Google Scholar   LinkedIn   Curriculum vitae (PDF)

News

Academic Services

  1. Workshop Organizer: Grounded and Faithful Vision-Language Models for Real-World Deployment (VLM4RWD), NeurIPS 2026
  2. Workshop Organizer: Grounding Language Models: Learning Faithfully and Efficiently, EMNLP 2026
  3. Workshop Organizer: Vision Language Models: Challenges of Real World Deployment (VLM4RWD), NeurIPS 2025

Publications [Google Scholar]

  1. Findings of the First GroundLM Shared Tasks: Evaluating Grounded Language Models Across Visual and Scientific Evidence
    Yimu Wang, Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Xuye Liu, Yee Man Choi, Bo Xue, Krzysztof Czarnecki
    GroundLM Workshop at EMNLP, 2026.

    EMNLP Workshop 2026 Paper

  2. LitTraceQA: A Benchmark for Multi-Stage Grounding and Verification in Scientific Question Answering
    Xuye Liu, Yimu Wang, Peng Shi, Bo Xue, Xiangrui Ke, Songcheng Cai, Kath Choi, Di Wu, Freda Shi, Krzysztof Czarnecki
    GroundLM Workshop at EMNLP, 2026.

    EMNLP Workshop 2026 Paper

  3. ATTRICITE: Training an Open 4B Model for Citation Recovery toward Faithful Attribution
    Yee Man Choi, Xuehang Guo, Songcheng Cai, Yimu Wang, Yi R. Fung, Qingyun Wang
    NeurIPS Workshop on AI-Native Academia: Authorship, Peer Review, and Conference Governance under AI, 2026.

    NeurIPS Workshop 2026 ArXiv Code

  4. Where Does the Answer Come From? Benchmarking View-Level Visual Evidence Identification in Multi-View MLLMs for Autonomous Driving
    Yimu Wang, Yee Man Choi, Barry Zhang, Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Sean Sedwards, Krzysztof Czarnecki
    arXiv preprint, 2026.

    arXiv 2026 Arxiv

  5. VISTAQA: Benchmarking Joint Visual Question Answering and Pixel-Level Evidence
    Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Yimu Wang, Yongpeng Zhu, Lihong Chen, Milan Ganai, Sean Sedwards, Marco Pavone, Krzysztof Czarnecki
    Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026.

    NeurIPS 2026 ArXiv Project Dataset Code

  6. UNIFORM: Unifying Knowledge from Large-scale and Diverse Pre-trained Models
    Yimu Wang, Weiming Zhuang, Chen Chen, Jiabo Huang, Jingtao Li, Lingjuan Lyu
    IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR Findings), 2026.

    CVPR Findings 2026 Paper

  7. Mitigating the Modality Gap: Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection with Multi-modal Prototypes and Image Bias Estimation
    Yimu Wang, Evelien Riddell, Adrian Chow, Sean Sedwards, Krzysztof Czarnecki
    IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026.

    WACV 2026 Paper

  8. Lexicographic Lipschitz Bandits: New Algorithms and a Lower Bound
    Bo Xue, Ji Cheng, Fei Liu, Yimu Wang, Lijun Zhang, and Qingfu Zhang
    Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 2025.

    JMLR 2025 Paper

  9. Hawaii: Hierarchical Visual Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Vision-Language Models
    Yimu Wang, Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Sean Sedwards, Krzysztof Czarnecki
    Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025.

    NeurIPS 2025 Arxiv

  10. Survey of Video Diffusion Models: Foundations, Implementations, and Applications
    Yimu Wang, Xuye Liu, Wei Pang, Li Ma, Shuai Yuan, Paul Debevec, Ning Yu
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025.

    TMLR 2025 Arxiv Paper

  11. LEO-MINI: An Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model using Conditional Token Reduction and Mixture of Multi-Modal Experts
    Yimu Wang, Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Sean Sedwards, Krzysztof Czarnecki
    Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025.

    EMNLP 2025 Arxiv

  12. Rethinking Spectral Augmentation for Contrast-based Graph Self-Supervised Learning
    Xiangru Jian, Xinjian Zhao, Wei Pang, Chaolong Ying, Yimu Wang, Yaoyao Xu, Tianshu Yu
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025.

    TMLR 2025

  13. OV-SCAN: Semantically Consistent Alignment for Novel Object Discovery in Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Detection
    A. Chow, E. Riddell, Yimu Wang, S. Sedwards, K. Czarnecki
    International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.

    ICCV 2025 Arxiv

  14. NBDESCRIB: A Dataset for Text Description Generation from Tables and Code in Jupyter Notebooks with Guidelines
    Xuye Liu, Tengfei Ma, Yimu Wang, Fengjie Wang, Jian Zhao
    Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings of ACL), 2025.

    Findings of ACL 2025

  15. ELIOT: Zero-Shot Video-Text Retrieval through Relevance-Boosted Captioning and Structural Information Extraction
    Xuye Liu, Yimu Wang, Jian Zhao
    NAACL Student Research Workshop (SRW of NAACL), 2025.

    SRW of NAACL 2025 Paper

  16. DREAM: Improving Video-Text Retrieval Through Relevance-Based Augmentation Using Large Foundation Models
    Yimu Wang, Shuai Yuan, Bo Xue, Xiangru Jian, Wei Pang, Mushi Wang, Ning Yu
    Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2025.

    NAACL 2025 Paper

  17. AIDE: Improving 3D Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation by Aligned Vision-Language Learning
    Yimu Wang, Krzysztof Czarnecki
    IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025.

    WACV 2025 Paper

  18. Conditional Generative Adversarial Network-Assisted System for Radiation-Free Evaluation of Scoliosis Using a Single Smartphone Photograph: A Model Development and Validation Study
    Zhong He, Neng Lu, Yi Chen, Elvis Chun-Sing Chui, Zhen Liu, Xiaodong Qin, Jie Li, Shengru Wang, Junlin Yang, Zhiwei Wang, et al.
    eClinicalMedicine, 2024.

    eClinicalMedicine 2024

  19. NICE: CVPR 2023 Challenge on Zero-Shot Image Captioning
    Taehoon Kim, Pyunghwan Ahn, Sangyun Kim, Sihaeng Lee, Mark Marsden, Alessandra Sala, Seung Hwan Kim, Bohyung Han, Kyoung Mu Lee, Honglak Lee, et al.
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPR Workshops), 2024.

    CVPR Workshops 2024

  20. Self-Supervised Pretext Tasks for Event Sequence Data from Detecting Misalignment
    Yimu Wang, He Zhao, Ruizhi Deng, Frederick Tung, Greg Mori
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop (NeurIPS workshop), 2024.

    NeurIPS Workshop 2024 Paper

  21. Lost Domain Generalization Is a Natural Consequence of Lack of Training Domains
    Yimu Wang, Yihan Wu, Hongyang Zhang
    Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024.

    AAAI 2024 Paper

  22. Multiobjective Lipschitz Bandits under Lexicographic Ordering
    Bo Xue, Ji Cheng, Fei Liu, Yimu Wang, Qingfu Zhang
    Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024.

    AAAI 2024 Paper

  23. Efficient Algorithms for Generalized Linear Bandits with Heavy-tailed Rewards
    Bo Xue, Yimu Wang, Yuanyu Wan, Jinfeng Yi, and Lijun Zhang
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.

    NeurIPS 2023 Paper

  24. Balance Act: Mitigating Hubness in Cross-Modal Retrieval with Query and Gallery Banks
    Yimu Wang, Xiangru Jian, Bo Xue
    Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP Oral), 2023.

    EMNLP (Oral) 2023 Paper Code

  25. Video-Text Retrieval by Supervised Sparse Multi-Grained Learning
    Yimu Wang, Peng Shi
    Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Findings of EMNLP), 2023.

    Findings of EMNLP 2023 Paper Code

  26. InvGC: Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval by Inverse Graph Convolution
    Xiangru Jian, Yimu Wang
    Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Findings of EMNLP), 2023.

    Findings of EMNLP 2023 Paper Code

  27. Cooperation or Competition: Avoiding Player Domination for Multi-target Robustness by Adaptive Budgets
    Yimu Wang, Dinghuai Zhang, Yihan Wu, Heng Huang, Hongyang Zhang
    IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023.

    CVPR 2023 Paper

  28. Investigating the Existence of “Secret Language” in Language Models
    Yimu Wang, Peng Shi, Hongyang Zhang
    arXiv preprint, 2023.

    arXiv 2023 Arxiv

  29. Multimodal Federated Learning via Contrastive Representation Ensemble
    Qiying Yu, Yang Liu, Yimu Wang, Ke Xu, Jingjing Liu
    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.

    ICLR 2023 Paper Code

  30. Multi-View Fusion Transformer for Sensor-Based Human Activity Recognition
    Yimu Wang, Kun Yu, Yubo Wang, Hongwei Xue
    arXiv preprint, 2022.

    arXiv 2022 Arxiv

  31. Deep Unified Cross-Modality Hashing by Pairwise Data Alignment
    Yimu Wang, Bo Xue, Quan Cheng, Yuhui Chen, and Lijun Zhang
    International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2021.

    IJCAI 2021 Paper

  32. Classification of Neurofibromatosis-Related Dystrophic or Nondystrophic Scoliosis Based on Image Features Using Bilateral CNN
    Zhengwang He, Yimu Wang, Xue Qin, Rui Yin, Yong Qiu, Ke He, Zezhang Zhu
    Medical Physics, 2021.

    Medical Physics 2021

  33. Piecewise Hashing: A Deep Hashing Method for Large-Scale Fine-Grained Search
    Yimu Wang, Xiu-Shen Wei, Bo Xue, Lijun Zhang
    Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision (PRCV), 2020.

    PRCV 2020

  34. Searching Privately by Imperceptible Lying: A Novel Private Hashing Method with Differential Privacy
    Yimu Wang, Shiyin Lu, and Lijun Zhang
    ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2020.

    ACM MM 2020 Paper

  35. Nearly Optimal Regret for Stochastic Linear Bandits with Heavy-Tailed Payoffs
    Bo Xue, Guanghui Wang, Yimu Wang, Lijun Zhang
    International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2020.

    IJCAI 2020 Paper

  36. An Adversarial Domain Adaptation Network for Cross-Domain Fine-Grained Recognition
    Yimu Wang, Ren-Jie Song, Xiu-Shen Wei, and Lijun Zhang
    IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2020.

    WACV 2020 Paper

Education and Research Experience

Experience

Awards