Portrait of Yichao Cai

Yichao Cai

Ph.D. Candidate · Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide

Hello, I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, University of Adelaide, advised by Prof. Javen Qinfeng Shi, Dr. Zhen Zhang, and Dr. Yuhang Liu. Previously, I received my B.Eng. and M.Sc. from Wuhan University of Technology, where I was advised by Prof. Xiao Zhou.

My research focuses on multimodal representation learning and principled disentanglement. I study identifiability, causal reasoning, and language as an inductive signal to build explainable systems that uncover the semantic structure underlying complex visual–language data.

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News

  • I served as a guest lecturer in the Statistical Machine Learning course at the University of Adelaide, presenting recent advances in vision–language modeling. See the lecture slides.
  • Excited to share that our work on cross-modal misalignment was selected as a Spotlight (top 3.2%) at NeurIPS 2025!
  • Check out our new preprint: "On the Value of Cross-Modal Misalignment in Multimodal Representation Learning".
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Selected Publications

Thumbnail for NTP concepts paper
I Predict Therefore I Am: Is Next Token Prediction Enough to Learn Human-Interpretable Concepts from Data?
Yuhang Liu, Dong Gong, Yichao Cai, Erdun Gao, Zhen Zhang, Biwei Huang, Mingming Gong, Anton van den Hengel, and Javen Q. Shi
Preprint, 2025
Abs PDF Project
Thumbnail for cross-modal misalignment paper
On the Value of Cross-Modal Misalignment in Multimodal Representation Learning
Yichao Cai*, Yuhang Liu*, Erdun Gao, Tianjiao Jiang, Zhen Zhang, Anton van den Hengel, and Javen Q. Shi
NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight
Abs PDF Project Code Post
Thumbnail for CLAP paper
CLAP: Isolating Content from Style through Contrastive Learning with Augmented Prompts
Yichao Cai, Yuhang Liu, Zhen Zhang, and Javen Q. Shi
ECCV 2024
Abs PDF Project Code

Teaching

  • Guest Lecturer & Head Tutor, Statistical Machine Learning (Semester 2, 2025) @ University of Adelaide
  • Teaching Assistant, Using Machine Learning Tools (Trimester 2, 2025) @ University of Adelaide
  • Teaching Assistant, Concepts in AI and ML (Trimester 1, 2025) @ University of Adelaide

Honors & Awards

  • NeurIPS 2025 Scholar Award, 2025
  • University of Adelaide Research Scholarships, 2023
  • Award for Outstanding Graduates, Wuhan University of Technology, 2019
  • Merit Graduate Student Award, Wuhan University of Technology, 2017

Blog

Some notes and thoughts on machine learning and representation learning.

Contact

Email: yichao.cai@adelaide.edu.au

Office: LG.25.04, AIML Building, Lot Fourteen, Corner of North Terrace & Frome Road, Adelaide SA 5000, Australia