Portrait of Yingheng Wang

Yingheng Wang

PhD Candidate, Computer Science · Cornell University

About

I am a 4th-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Cornell University, advised by Carla P. Gomes. I also work closely with Volodymyr Kuleshov and Christopher De Sa. I am affiliated with Cornell AI for Science Institute and AI-LEAF Institute. My research studies knowledge-driven AI with its applications to scientific discovery. I was also student researcher at Amazon Grand Challenge, AWS AI Lab, Microsoft Research, and NEC Lab America, where my research led to impactful papers and patents on computational antibody design, protein language models, time-series foundation models, and theoretical graph learning. My research has been generously supported by Cornell Presidential Life Science Fellowship.

Research Interests

My research centers on developing knowledge-driven AI methods that integrate physical and domain knowledge into modern machine learning techniques to improve their efficacy, efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. Current research topics include:

These thrusts converge to build AI systems that can reason, learn efficiently, and generalize robustly in complex real-world scenarios, ultimately advancing scientific discovery and innovation.

Selected Publications

Physics-informed Density of States Prediction with Structure-Aware Sequence Decoding and Mass-Conserving Refinement

Yingheng Wang, Francesco Ricci, Tao Yu, Junwen Bai, Shufeng Kong, John M. Gregoire, Carla P. Gomes

Nature Computational Science (Under Review)

Iterative Multi-Objective Policy Optimization for Antibody Sequence Design

Yingheng Wang, Can Chen, Karla-Luise Herpoldt, Sukanya Sasmal, Tommi Jaakkola, Marcus D. Collins, Shang Shang

ICLR 2026 (Under Review)

HeuriGym: An Agentic Benchmark for LLM-Crafted Heuristics in Combinatorial Optimization

Hongzheng Chen*, Yingheng Wang*, Yaohui Cai*, Hins Hu*, Jiajie Li*, Shirley Huang, Chenhui Deng, Rongjian Liang, Shufeng Kong, Haoxing Ren, Samitha Samaranayake, Carla P. Gomes, Zhiru Zhang

NeurIPS 2025 ยท MATH-AI

LC-PLM: Long-context Protein Language Modeling Using Bidirectional Mamba with Shared Projection Layers

Yingheng Wang, Zichen Wang, Gil Sadeh, Luca Zancato, Alessandro Achille, George Karypis, Huzefa Rangwala.

TMLR 2025

Diffusion Variational Inference: Diffusion Models as Expressive Variational Posteriors

Yingheng Wang*, Top Wasu Piriyakulkij*, Volodymyr Kuleshov

AAAI 2025

InfoDiffusion: Representation Learning Using Information Maximizing Diffusion Models

Yingheng Wang, Yair Schiff, Aaron Gokaslan, Weishen Pan, Fei Wang, Christopher De Sa, Volodymyr Kuleshov

ICML 2023

See full list →

Services

Area Chair: NeurIPS (AI4Science).

Conference Reviewer: ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, AISTATS, UAI, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV.

Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), Bioinformatics, Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), Smart Health, Acta Automatica Sinica.