Yu-Cheng Chou

CS Ph.D. Student @ Johns Hopkins University, advised by Prof. Alan Yuille
PhD Research Intern @ NVIDIA, advised by Dr. Zhiding Yu

I received my MSE from Johns Hopkins University in 2024, where I was advised by Prof. Zongwei Zhou, and my BSE from Wuhan University in 2022, where I was advised by Prof. Deng-Ping Fan. Previously, I've worked as a research intern at Philips Research, Microsoft Research Asia, Tencent Wesure, and Kuaishou.

I study intelligence in the physical world—building systems that can perceive, reason about, and act within 3D environments. My current work focuses on world models and embodied AI, aiming to bridge visual understanding with real-world interaction. Previously, I worked on scalable training, dataset curation, and annotation for medical imaging.

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What's New

News

2026/01Captain Safari accepted to CVPR 2026!
2026/01Generative Adversarial Reasoner accepted to ICLR 2026!
2025/09Released GPT-OSS Visual Alignment blog.
2025/09SpatialReasoner and VLV Auto-Encoder accepted to NeurIPS 2025!
2025/063DSRBench accepted to ICCV 2025!
2024/09Touchstone Benchmark accepted to NeurIPS 2024!
2024/06Embracing Massive Medical Data accepted to MICCAI 2024.
2023/06SynTumor accepted to MICCAI 2023.
2023/01Started PhD at Johns Hopkins University.
2022/08DGNet accepted to MIR 2023. PNS+ accepted to MIR 2022.
2022/06Received First Prize for Outstanding Academic College Students (CCF).
2021/03PNS-Net early accepted to MICCAI 2021!

Research

Selected Publications

* equal contribution

2026

Captain Safari: A World Engine with Pose-Aligned 3D Memory

Yu-Cheng Chou, Xingrui Wang, Yitong Li, Jiahao Wang, Cihang Xie, Alan L Yuille, Junfei Xiao

CVPR 2026

PDF Project Code

Generative Adversarial Reasoner: Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Adversarial Reinforcement Learning

Qihao Liu, Luoxin Ye, Wufei Ma, Yu-Cheng Chou, Alan Yuille

ICLR 2026

PDF

2025

SpatialReasoner: Towards Explicit and Generalizable 3D Spatial Reasoning

Wufei Ma*, Yu-Cheng Chou*, Qihao Liu*, Xingrui Wang, Celso de Melo, Jieneng Chen, Jianwen Xie, Alan Yuille

NeurIPS 2025

PDF Project Code

Vision-Language-Vision Auto-Encoder: Scalable Knowledge Distillation from Diffusion Models

Tiezheng Zhang, Yitong Li, Yu-Cheng Chou, Jieneng Chen, Alan Yuille, Chen Wei, Junfei Xiao

NeurIPS 2025

PDF Project Code

3DSRBench: A Comprehensive 3D Spatial Reasoning Benchmark

Wufei Ma, Haoyu Chen, Guofeng Zhang, Yu-Cheng Chou, Celso M de Melo, Alan Yuille

ICCV 2025

PDF Project Data

Ultrasound Image Synthesis Using Generative AI for Lung Ultrasound Detection

Yu-Cheng Chou, Gary Y Li, Li Chen, Mohsen Zahiri, Naveen Balaraju, Shubham Patil, Bryson Hicks, ..., Alvin Chen

ISBI 2025

PDF

2024

Touchstone Benchmark: Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating AI Algorithms for Medical Segmentation?

Pedro RAS Bassi, Wenxuan Li, Yucheng Tang, Fabian Isensee, Zifu Wang, Jieneng Chen, Yu-Cheng Chou, ..., Alan L Yuille, Zongwei Zhou

NeurIPS 2024

PDF Code

Embracing Massive Medical Data

Yu-Cheng Chou, Zongwei Zhou, Alan Yuille

MICCAI 2024

PDF Code

Acquiring Weak Annotations for Tumor Localization in Temporal and Volumetric Data

Yu-Cheng Chou, Bowen Li, Deng-Ping Fan, Alan Yuille, Zongwei Zhou

Machine Intelligence Research 2024

PDF Code

2023

Early Detection and Localization of Pancreatic Cancer by Label-Free Tumor Synthesis

Bowen Li, Yu-Cheng Chou, Shuwen Sun, Hualin Qiao, Alan Yuille, Zongwei Zhou

MICCAI 2023

PDF Code

Deep Gradient Learning for Efficient Camouflaged Object Detection

Ge-Peng Ji, Deng-Ping Fan, Yu-Cheng Chou, Dengxin Dai, Alexander Liniger, Luc Van Gool

Machine Intelligence Research 2023

PDF Code

2022

Video Polyp Segmentation: A Deep Learning Perspective

Ge-Peng Ji*, Guobao Xiao*, Yu-Cheng Chou*, Deng-Ping Fan, Kai Zhao, Geng Chen, Huazhu Fu, Luc Van Gool

Machine Intelligence Research 2022

PDF Code

2021

Progressively Normalized Self-Attention Network for Video Polyp Segmentation

Ge-Peng Ji*, Yu-Cheng Chou*, Deng-Ping Fan, Geng Chen, Huazhu Fu, Debesh Jha, Ling Shao

MICCAI 2021 (Early Accept, 13%; Student Travel Award, 5.8%)

PDF Code

Automatic Polyp and Instrument Segmentation in MedAI-2021

Yu-Cheng Chou

Nordic Machine Intelligence 2021 (MedAI-2021 Challenge Rank 2nd)

PDF

Writing

Blog

Well-Formed, Ill-Grounded: Visual Alignment Gaps Where GPT-OSS Falls Short of Qwen

Yu-Cheng Chou, Hardy Chen, Haoqin Tu, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zeyu Zheng, Yuyin Zhou, ALan Yuille, Cihang Xie, Junfei Xiao

Notion Blog, 2025

Blog

Background

Education

Johns Hopkins University

Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2023 – Present

M.S.E. in Computer Science, 2024

Advisor: Prof. Alan Yuille

Wuhan University

B.S.E., 2022

Industry

Experience

NVIDIA

PhD Research Intern · 2026

Philips Research

Research Intern · 2024

Microsoft Research Asia

Research Intern · 2022

Tencent Wesure

Computer Vision Intern · 2021

Kuaishou

Intern of Video Transmission Algorithm · 2020

Community

Academic Service

Challenge Organizer

Embodied Spatial Reasoning (ICCV 2025),
Body Maps (MICCAI 2024, ISBI 2024).

Conference Reviewer

CVPR₂₀₂₆, ECCV₂₀₂₆, ICLR₂₀₂₆, NeurIPS₂₀₂₅/₂₀₂₄, ICML₂₀₂₄, AISTATS₂₀₂₅, MICCAI₂₀₂₄/₂₀₂₃, IEEE ICIP₂₀₂₂, IJECES₂₀₂₂/₂₀₂₁.

Journal Reviewer

Transactions on Image Processing, Machine Intelligence Research, Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, Sensors, Scientific Reports, Bioengineering, The Visual Computer, Diagnostics.