💾 About Me

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University (PSU), advised by Professor Jinghui Chen.
Before joining Penn State, I received my B.Eng. degree in Artificial Intelligence from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST).
During my undergraduate studies, I was fortunate to work with Professor Huaizu Jiang at Northeastern University and Professor Shan Tan at HUST.

My research interests lie in AI Agent, reasoning, multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and trustworthy machine learning. I am open for collaborations in research.

I am actively looking for 2027 summer internship opportunities!

📝 Publications

Preprint

Skill Transfer: Adapting Agent Skills from Strong to Weak Agents

Yifan Lan, Hanyu Wang, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen

Paper

Code

Preprint

SkillGrad: Optimizing Agent Skills Like Gradient Descent

Hanyu Wang, Yifan Lan, Bochuan Cao, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen

Paper

Code

Preprint

The Illusion of Reasoning: Exposing Evasive Data Contamination in LLMs via Zero-CoT Truncation

Yifan Lan, Yuanpu Cao, Hanyu Wang, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen

Paper

Code

EMNLP 2025 Oral 🏆

Phi: Preference Hijacking in Multi-modal Large Language Models at Inference Time

Yifan Lan, Yuanpu Cao, Weitong Zhang, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen

Paper

Code

TMLR

Mixture of Balanced Information Bottlenecks for LongTailed Visual Recognition

Yifan Lan, Xin Cai, Jun Cheng, Shan Tan

Paper

📖 Educations

• 2025.08 – Present, Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University.
• 2021.09 - 2025.06, B.Eng. Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

🖥️ Research

• 2024.06 - Present, Advisor: Jinghui Chen, PSU.
• 2024.03 - 2024.08, Advisor: Huaizu Jiang, NEU Boston.
• 2023.07 - 2024.05, Advisor: Shan Tan, HUST.