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 1400+ 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

• 2025.11: 🎉 One paper accepted by AAAI 2026!
• 2025.08: 🎉 One paper accepted by PRCV 2025!
• 2025.05: 🎉 One paper accepted by ICML 2025!
• 2025.05: 🎉 One collaborative paper accepted by ICML 2025!
• 2025.03: 🎉 One collaborative paper accepted by IEEE TPAMI!
• 2024.12: 🎉 One collaborative paper accepted by AAAI 2025!

📝 Selected Publications [Full List]

• AAAI 2026 ProCache: Constraint-Aware Feature Caching with Selective Computation for Diffusion Transformer Acceleration, Fanpu Cao, Yaofo Chen^†, Zeng You, Wei Luo. Jan 20-27, 2026. Singapore, Singapore. PDF / Poster / Code
• 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. July 13-19, 2025. Vancouver, Canada. PDF / Poster / Slides / Code / Project Page
• 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
• 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

📚 Academic Services

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

• International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Reviewer 2022-2026
• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Reviewer 2021-2026
• Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Reviewer 2021-2025
• Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Reviewer 2022-2026
• International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Reviewer 2023-2025
• European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Reviewer 2022-2026
• AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Reviewer 2025-2026
• IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems (IEEE TSMC-S), Reviewer 2026–present
• Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Reviewer 2026
• IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), Reviewer 2026
• British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), Reviewer 2026
• International Conference on Learning Representations Workshop on Test-Time Updates (ICLRW-TTU), Reviewer 2026

📘 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