Yanlin Chen

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Virginia, advised by Prof. Xi Peng. Before joining UVA, I earned my B.Eng. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in 2024.

My research interest lies in mechanistic interpretability, interpretable machine learning (IML) and multimldal models, with an emphasis on understanding inner workings of models.

Email / Scholar / GitHub /

News

Jul 2026 Our paper "World Knowledge" in the Weights: Reading Concept Circuits of Vision Transformers was accepted as oral presentation at ECCV 2026!
May 2026 Our paper Inside the Visual Mind: Neuroscience-Motivated Concept Circuits for Interpreting and Steering Vision Transformers was accepted at ICML 2026!
May 2025 Our paper Structure-informed Risk Minimization for Robust Ensemble Learning was accepted at ICML 2025!

Publication

	"World Knowledge" in the Weights: Reading Concept Circuits of Vision Transformers Yanlin Chen, Tang Li, Xi Peng ECCV 2026 Oral paper / code
	Inside the Visual Mind: Neuroscience-Motivated Concept Circuits for Interpreting and Steering Vision Transformers Tang Li, Yanlin Chen, Mengmeng Ma, Xi Peng ICML 2026 paper / code
	Structure-informed Risk Minimization for Robust Ensemble Learning Fengchun Qiao, Yanlin Chen, Xi Peng ICML 2025 paper / code

Service

Served as reviewer for NeurIPS'26, CVPR'26, ECCV'26

Teaching

Fall 2025 CISC684 Machine Learning