B.Sc. (Tsinghua), Ph.D. (Northwestern)
Associate Professor
IEEE Senior Member 

Research Areas
  • Artificial Intelligence
    • Deep Learning
    • Machine Learning
    • Computer Vision

Links

Biography

Prof. Yu Cheng joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2024. He is also the Chief Scientist at Kunlun Wanwei Technology and Skywork AI. His research interests specialize in efficient/sparse architectures, model compression, and multimodal learning. From 2018 to 2023, he was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, and led several teams to productize the aforementioned techniques for Microsoft-OpenAI models (Copilot, DALL-E-2, ChatGPT, GPT-4). From 2023 to 2025, he was the Chief Scientist at Minimax. Together with Minimax and Skywork AI, he delivered many GenAI models: Minimax abab6.5/7, M1, Hailuo Video, Skywork SuperAgent, Skyweels and Matrix-Game. Prof. Cheng serves as a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS and ICML and as an Area Chair for CVPR, ICLR, ACL and EMNLP. He also serve as the Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) and ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST). His papers have won IEEE 2024 SPS Young Author Best Paper Award, Outstanding Paper Award in NeurIPS 2023, and Best Student Paper Honorable Mention in WACV 2021. He is an affiliate professor/faculty at Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, and University of Science and Technology of China.