Yifan Guo 郭一凡

First-year PhD student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Portrait of Yifan Guo

About

I am a first-year PhD student at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, advised by Prof. Weiyang Liu. I received my bachelor's degree with honors from the School of Integrated Circuits and Zhiyuan College at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Previously, I was a research intern at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA).

Research

  • Large language model architectures and pre-training
  • Machine learning systems

Publications

Breaking the Exactness Barrier: Interleaved DeepSeek Sparse Attention for Efficient Long Context Reasoning

Yifan Guo, Wei Cui Blog NeurIPS 2026

TL;DR: Top-k selection in sparse attention is difficult to optimize in distributed systems because it introduces global dependencies. We interleave the context across GPUs and perform top-k selection locally on each GPU, eliminating the global dependency.

SEDG: Stitch-Compatible End-to-End Layout Decomposition Based on Graph Neural Network

Yifan Guo, Jiawei Chen, Yexin Li, Yunxiang Zhang, Qing Zhang, Yuhang Zhang, Yongfu Li Paper DATE 2025

TL;DR: Layout decomposition is an important step in chip manufacturing. We explore a more efficient decomposition method using heterogeneous graph neural networks.

Honors

  • Shanghai Outstanding Graduate
  • National Scholarship
  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University Class-A Scholarship