Research

Papers and ongoing work.

ENCORE teaser

ENCORE: Few-Shot Agentic Discovery of Manipulation Strategies

Yifan Kang, Zihan Wang, Zhiwen Fan, Bangya Liu

Oral Presentation, NeurIPS 2026 Robot Learning Workshop

A coding agent reads three demonstrations, writes an executable policy program, and repairs it from its own execution traces.

Interpretability pipeline for diffusion language models

Interpreting Diffusion Language Models Over Denoising Time

Jingcheng Yang*, Shangtong Wu*, Yifan Kang*, Tianhu Xiong, Mingyuan Wu, Haozhen Zheng, Alex Schwing, Klara Nahrstedt  (*equal contribution)

CoLM 2026 Workshop on Non-Autoregressive Language Models

Sparse autoencoders and cross-layer transcoders for diffusion LLMs, with timestep-aware tracing and causal interventions.

Doodle Agent

Doodle Agent: Exploring Freeform Visual Generation with Multimodal LLMs

Dingning Cao*, Yifan Kang*, Yael Vinker, Antonio Torralba  (*equal contribution)

ICCV 2025 Workshop on AI for Visual Arts (AI4VA)

A drawing agent that turns natural-language prompts into drawing actions, iteratively choosing brushes, colors, and coordinates.

CNOT circuits under a topological constraint

CNOT-Optimal Circuit Synthesis

Yifan Kang

Top 5 Paper, Research Science Institute (RSI), 2023

Synthesizing CNOT circuits under directed topological constraints, with hardness results for minimizing circuit size.