I am a post-doctoral researcher with School of Future Technology (未来技术学院) at South China University of Technology (华南理工大学), working with Prof. Mingkui Tan (谭明奎) and Prof. Cen Chen (陈岑). I received my bachelor and PHD degree from South China University of Technology in 2018 and 2024, respectively. I published papers in top venues, including ICLR, ICML, CVPR, AAAI, IEEE TCSVT and Neural Networks. As of now, my research has been cited more than 1700+ times, as reported by Google Scholar. I served as the reviewer for several top-tier machine learning/computer vision conferences, including ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI and etc. My research interests are broadly in machine learning, with a particular focus on the design, optimization, and adaptation of structures and architectures across physical and learning systems, including:

• Intelligent Electromagnetic Structure Design and Optimization (for Filtering Antennas and RF/Microwave Circuits and Chips)
• Architecture Optimization and Acceleration for Large Language Models and Foundation Models
• Automated Machine Learning (Neural Architecture Search and Discrete Combinatorial Optimization)
• Test-Time Adaptation and Learning (for Robustness Under Data Distribution Shifts)

I am open to research collaborations and co-supervising students on topics related to intelligent electromagnetic structure design/search, efficient neural architecture design and optimization, and machine learning.

🔥 News

• 2026.05: 🎉 One paper accepted by ICML 2026!
• 2026.04: 🎉 One paper accepted by ACL 2026!
• 2025.11: 🎉 One paper accepted by AAAI 2026!
• 2025.08: 🎉 One paper accepted by PRCV 2025!
• 2025.05: 🎉 One paper accepted by ICML 2025!

📝 Selected Publications [Full List]

• ICML 2025 Core Context Aware Transformers for Long Context Language Modeling, Yaofo Chen, Zeng You, Shuhai Zhang, Haokun Li, Yirui Li, Yaowei Wang, Mingkui Tan. PDF / Poster / Slides / Code / Project Page
• AAAI 2026 ProCache: Constraint-Aware Feature Caching with Selective Computation for Diffusion Transformer Acceleration, Fanpu Cao, Yaofo Chen^†, Zeng You, Wei Luo. PDF / Code
• ICML 2026 LoKiFormer: Locality-aware Attention with Decoupled Knowledge Memory for Efficient Large Language Model Pretraining, Zimo Liu, Qiuwu Chen, Yuchen Li, Ying Sun, Yifan Zhang, Zhijie Qiu, Zeng You, Ryan Dong, Simeng Ma, Yaofo Chen^†, Mingkui Tan^†. PDF / Code
• TCSVT 2024 Automated Dominative Subspace Mining for Efficient Neural Architecture Search, Yaofo Chen, Yong Guo, Daihai Liao, Fanbing Lv, Hengjie Song, James Tin-Yau Kwok, Mingkui Tan. PDF / Code
• ICLR 2024 Towards Robust and Efficient Cloud-Edge Elastic Model Adaptation via Selective Entropy Distillation, Yaofo Chen, Shuaicheng Niu, Yaowei Wang, Shoukai Xu, Hengjie Song, Mingkui Tan. PDF / Poster / Slides / Code
• CVPR 2021 Contrastive Neural Architecture Search with Neural Architecture Comparators, Yaofo Chen, Yong Guo, Qi Chen, Minli Li, Wei Zeng, Yaowei Wang, Mingkui Tan. PDF / Supp / Poster / Slides / Code
• ACL 2026 Latent-Condensed Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling, Zeng You^*, Yaofo Chen^*, Shuhai Zhang, Yingjian Li, Ying Sun, Qiuwu Chen, Yaowei Wang, Mingkui Tan. PDF / Code
• ICML 2020 Breaking the Curse of Space Explosion: Towards Efficient NAS with Curriculum Search, Yong Guo^*, Yaofo Chen^*, Yin Zheng, Peilin Zhao, Jian Chen, Junzhou Huang, Mingkui Tan. PDF / Supp / Poster / Slides / Code
• PRCV 2025 Sensitivity-Aware Post-Training Quantization for Deep Neural Networks, Zekang Zheng, Haokun Li, Yaofo Chen^†, Mingkui Tan, Qing Du. PDF / Poster

📚 Academic Services

I actively contribute to the research community through peer reviewing for major machine learning and computer vision conferences and journals.

• Reviewer: ICLR 2022-2026, ICML 2021-2026, NeurIPS 2021-2025, CVPR 2022-2026, ICCV 2023-2025, ECCV 2022-2026, AAAI 2025-2026, WACV 2026, ICME 2026, BMVC 2026, ICLRW-TTU 2026
• Reviewer: IEEE TPAMI 2026–present, IEEE TSMC-S 2026–present

📘 Grants

• Regional Innovation and Development Joint Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (国自然区域联合基金，参与), Government-sponsored Research Projects, Project Participant, 2026-2029
• General Program of GuangDong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (广东省面上), Government-sponsored Research Projects, Principle Investigator, 2026-2028
• Postdoctoral Research Project Funding of Guangzhou (广州市博士后启动项目), Government-sponsored Research Projects, Principle Investigator, 2025-2026
• Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of CPSF (C) (博士后国资助计划C), Government-sponsored Fellowship Program, Awardee, 2025

🥇 Awards

• First Prize of Natural Science Award (by) Guangdong Association of Artificial Intelligence Industry
• Shenzhen Outstanding Scientific and Academic Paper Award