Yana Wei

Ph.D. Student @ Johns Hopkins University

ywei66 [at] jh.edu

Greetings! Welcome to my homepage!

I am a second year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at VIU Lab, Johns Hopkins University, advised by Prof. Vishal Patel. I earned my Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering at Shandong University in 2021, followed by a M.S. degree of Computer Science at ShanghaiTech University in 2024, supervised by Prof. Xuming He.

My research interests broadly include computer vision, natural language processing and embodied agents, with a focus on vision-languge understanding. I'm excited about creating AI agents that can understand human needs across various modalities.

Recent highlights

🎉🎉[September, 2025] Our paper Open Vision Reasoner and Perception-R1 has been both accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
🎉🎉[May, 2025] Our paper Perception in Reflection has been accepted at ICML 2025.
🎉🎉[July, 2024] Our paper Merlin: Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds has been accepted at ECCV 2024.
🎉🎉[July, 2023] Our paper Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation Reasoning has been accepted at ICCV 2023.

Selected publications

Open Vision Reasoner: Transferring Linguistic Cognitive Behavior for Visual Reasoning

Yana Wei*, Liang Zhao *, Jianjian Sun *, Kangheng Lin, Jisheng Yin, Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, En Yu, Haoran Lv, Zejia Weng, Jia Wang, Chunrui Han, Yuang Peng, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang, Vishal M. Patel

NeurIPS 2025

[Project Page] [Paper]
Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning

En Yu*, Kangheng Lin*, Liang Zhao*, Jisheng Yin, Yana Wei, Yuang Peng, Haoran Wei, Jianjian Sun, Chunrui Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang, Jingyu Wang, Wenbing Tao

NeurIPS 2025

[Project Page] [Paper]
Perception in Reflection

Yana Wei*, Liang Zhao*, Kangheng Lin, En Yu, Yuang Peng, Runpei Dong, Jianjian Sun, Haoran Wei, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Vishal M. Patel

ICML 2025

[Project Page] [Paper]
Merlin: Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds

En Yu*, Liang Zhao*, Yana Wei, Jinrong Yang, Dongming Wu, Lingyu Kong, Haoran Wei, Tiancai Wang, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Wenbing Tao

ECCV 2024

[Project Page] [Paper]
Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation Reasoning

Yu Wu*, Yana Wei*, Haozhe Wang, Yongfei Liu, Sibei Yang, Xuming He

ICCV 2023

[Project Page] [Paper] [Suppl] [Code] [Video]

Ph.D. Student @ Johns Hopkins University

Recent highlights

Selected publications

Open Vision Reasoner: Transferring Linguistic Cognitive Behavior for Visual Reasoning

Perception-R1: Pioneering Perception Policy with Reinforcement Learning

Perception in Reflection

Merlin: Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Foresight Minds

Grounded Image Text Matching with Mismatched Relation Reasoning

Awards

Singing Videos