Wenfang (Dorothy) Yao

Wenfang Yao is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Division of Artificial Intelligence, Lingnan University. Prior to joining Lingnan University, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Prof. Jing (Harry) Qin at the School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoqi Yang and her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Sun Yat-sen University.

Her research interests lie in healthcare analytics and clinical multimodal learning. Her work focuses on modeling heterogeneous and incomplete data to support disease diagnosis and progression analysis. She also studies optimization theory and its role in building reliable and robust machine learning models. Her work has appeared in leading venues such as NeurIPS, AAAI, SIAM Journal on Optimization, and Mathematical Programming. She has served as a reviewer for NeurIPS and ICLR, and journals in optimization and medical informatics.

Selected Publications

ICLR-26

MASAM: Multimodal Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Heterogeneous Data Fusion

Zijie Chen , Kejing Yin , Wenfang Yao, William K. Cheung , and Jing Qin

In International Conference on Learning Representations , 2026

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{chen2026masam,
  author = {Chen, Zijie and Yin, Kejing and Yao, Wenfang and Cheung, William K. and Qin, Jing},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
  title = {MASAM: Multimodal Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Heterogeneous Data Fusion},
  year = {2026},
}

NeurIPS-25

Multimodal Disease Progression Modeling via Spatiotemporal Disentanglement and Multiscale Alignment

Chen Liu , Wenfang Yao, Kejing Yin , William K. Cheung , and Jing Qin

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , 2025 Spotlight Acceptance Rate: 3.19%

Bib PDF Code Poster Slides

@inproceedings{chen2025dipro,
  author = {Liu, Chen and Yao, Wenfang and Yin, Kejing and Cheung, William K. and Qin, Jing},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  title = {Multimodal Disease Progression Modeling via Spatiotemporal Disentanglement and Multiscale Alignment},
  award = {Spotlight},
  acceptance = {Acceptance Rate: 3.19\%},
  year = {2025},
}

NeurIPS-24

Addressing Asynchronicity in Clinical Multimodal Fusion via Individualized Chest X-ray Generation

Wenfang Yao*, Chen Liu* , Kejing Yin , William K. Cheung , and Jing Qin

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems , 2024

Bib HTML PDF Code

@inproceedings{yao2024ddlcxr,
  author = {Yao*, Wenfang and Liu*, Chen and Yin, Kejing and Cheung, William K. and Qin, Jing},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  pages = {29001--29028},
  title = {Addressing Asynchronicity in Clinical Multimodal Fusion via Individualized Chest {X}-ray Generation},
  volume = {37},
  year = {2024},
}

AAAI-24

DrFuse: Learning Disentangled Representation for Clinical Multi-Modal Fusion with Missing Modality and Modal Inconsistency

Wenfang Yao*, Kejing Yin* , William K. Cheung , Jia Liu , and Jing Qin

In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence , 2024

Bib HTML PDF Code

@inproceedings{yao2024drfuse,
  title = {{DrFuse}: Learning Disentangled Representation for Clinical Multi-Modal Fusion with Missing Modality and Modal Inconsistency},
  volume = {38},
  url = {https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/29578},
  doi = {10.1609/aaai.v38i15.29578},
  number = {15},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  author = {Yao*, Wenfang and Yin*, Kejing and Cheung, William K. and Liu, Jia and Qin, Jing},
  year = {2024},
  pages = {16416-16424},
}

SIAMOpt

Relative Lipschitz-like Property of Parametric Systems via Projectional Coderivatives

Wenfang Yao, and Xiaoqi Yang

SIAM Journal on Optimization, 2023

Bib HTML PDF

@article{yao2023relative,
  title = {Relative Lipschitz-like Property of Parametric Systems via Projectional Coderivatives},
  author = {Yao, Wenfang and Yang, Xiaoqi},
  journal = {SIAM Journal on Optimization},
  volume = {33},
  number = {3},
  pages = {2021--2040},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {SIAM},
}

JOTA

Lipschitz-Like Property for Linear Constraint Systems

Wenfang Yao, and Xiaoqi Yang

Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 2023

Bib HTML PDF

@article{yao2023lipschitz,
  title = {Lipschitz-Like Property for Linear Constraint Systems},
  author = {Yao, Wenfang and Yang, Xiaoqi},
  journal = {Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications},
  volume = {199},
  number = {3},
  pages = {1281--1296},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {Springer US New York},
}

SVVA

Projectional Coderivatives and Calculus Rules

Wenfang Yao, Kaiwen Meng , Minghua Li , and Xiaoqi Yang

Set-Valued and Variational Analysis, 2023

Bib HTML PDF

@article{yao2023projectional,
  title = {Projectional Coderivatives and Calculus Rules},
  author = {Yao, Wenfang and Meng, Kaiwen and Li, Minghua and Yang, Xiaoqi},
  journal = {Set-Valued and Variational Analysis},
  volume = {31},
  number = {4},
  pages = {36},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {Springer},
}

Lipschitz-like Property Relative to a Set and the Generalized Mordukhovich Criterion

Kaiwen Meng , Minghua Li , Wenfang Yao, and Xiaoqi Yang

Mathematical Programming, 2021

Bib HTML PDF

@article{meng2021lipschitz,
  title = {Lipschitz-like Property Relative to a Set and the Generalized Mordukhovich Criterion},
  author = {Meng, Kaiwen and Li, Minghua and Yao, Wenfang and Yang, Xiaoqi},
  journal = {Mathematical Programming},
  volume = {189},
  pages = {455--489},
  year = {2021},
  publisher = {Springer},
}