Yichao Cai

Ph.D. Candidate · AIML, Adelaide University

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML), Adelaide University, advised by Prof. Javen Qinfeng Shi. Previously, I received my M.Sc. and B.Eng. in Instrument Science from Wuhan University of Technology.

My research studies multimodal learning and identifiable, causal representation learning, with a focus on how language supervision shapes alignment and semantic factorization in vision–language models. My goal is to build interpretable, reliable, and human-aligned AI systems that uncover amodal semantic representations underlying complex multimodal data.

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News

2025-01-29
Check out our new preprint: "The Geometric Mechanics of Contrastive Representation Learning: Alignment Potentials, Entropic Dispersion, and Cross-Modal Divergence".
2025-01-27
Happy to share that I’ll be attending MLSS Melbourne 2026 for two weeks (Feb 2–13, 2026). Looking forward to learning from world-class speakers and connecting with the community.

View older news

2025-10-16
I served as a guest lecturer in the Statistical Machine Learning course, presenting recent advances in vision–language modeling. See the lecture slides.
2025-09-19
Excited to share that our work on cross-modal misalignment was selected as a Spotlight (top 3.2%) at NeurIPS 2025!
2025-04-14
Check out our new preprint: "On the Value of Cross-Modal Misalignment in Multimodal Representation Learning".
2024-07-02
Our work, "CLAP: Isolating Content from Style through Contrastive Learning with Augmented Prompts", is accepted to appear at ECCV 2024.

Selected Publications

The Geometric Mechanics of Contrastive Representation Learning: Alignment Potentials, Entropic Dispersion, and Cross-Modal Divergence

Yichao Cai, Zhen Zhang, Yuhang Liu, and Javen Q. Shi

Preprint 2026

Paper Project Code

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

ICLR 2026

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

Paper Project Code

CLAP: Isolating Content from Style through Contrastive Learning with Augmented Prompts

Yichao Cai, Yuhang Liu, Zhen Zhang, and Javen Q. Shi

ECCV 2024

Paper Project Code

Academic Services

Reviewing - TMLR, ICLR (2026), ICML (2026).

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

Blog

Some notes and thoughts on machine learning and representation learning: ✦ Browse posts ✦

Honors & Awards

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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