We are a group working in medical artificial intelligence, exploring the new technologies and applications of artificial intelligence in healthcare. The following themes outline our current research interest:
Medical image analysis
Medical natural language processing
Bioinformatics
In the end, we are trying to integrate all modalities ( including medical images, patient demographics, clinical notes, and genes ) to develop a large multi-modal model and explore its new applications in healthcare.
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2024Founded
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4Postdoctoral Researcher
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3Ph.D Students
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11Visiting Students
Yefeng Zheng, PH.D.
School of Engineering
Medical Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Yefeng Zheng was born in the city of Jiangshan, Zhejiang Province, in 1975. He received B.E. and M.E. degrees from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1998 and 2001, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, USA in 2005. From 2006 to 2017, he worked at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, New Jersey, USA on medical image analysis. From 2018 to 2024, he was a Distinguished Scientist and Director of Tencent Jarvis Lab, leading the company's initiative on medical artificial intelligence. He joined Westlake University in July 2024 as a tenured full professor. He has invented 90+ US patents and published 400+ papers, which have been cited more than 35,000 times with an h-index of 93. He is a Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. He was a Program Co-Chair of International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2021, served as an area chair for various top conferences in artificial intelligence (e.g., NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, and MICCAI).
ICML 2026
MedREK: Retrieval-Based Editing for Medical LLMs with Key-Aware Prompts
Shujun Xia, Haokun Lin, Yichen Wu, Yinan Zhou, Zixuan Li, Zhongwei Wan, Xingrun Xing, Yefeng Zheng, Xiang Li, Caifeng Shan, Zhenan Sun, Quanzheng Li
ACL 2026, main
Beyond Surface Features: Advancing Medical Vision-Language Alignment via Dynamic Evidence-Guided Preference Optimization
Zixuan Huang, Zhihong Zhu, Xiaolong Liu, Yanchao Hao, Manman Zhang, Zheng Wei, Bowen Xing, Xian Wu, Ye Li, Fen Miao, Yefeng Zheng
ACL 2026, main
Guaranteeing Knowledge Integration with Joint Decoding for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Zhengyi Zhao, Shubo Zhang, Zezhong Wang, Yuxi Zhang, Huimin Wang, Yutian Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong, Xian Wu
ACL 2026, findings
MultiDx: A Multi-Source Knowledge Integration Framework towards Diagnostic Reasoning
Yimin Deng, Zhenxi Lin, Yejing Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Pengyue Jia, Zichuan Fu, Derong Xu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Li Zhu, Xian Wu, Xueming Qian
ACL 2026, findings
AdapTime: Enabling Adaptive Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models
Yimin Deng, Yejing Wang, Zhenxi Lin, Zichuan Fu, Guoshuai Zhao, Derong Xu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Xian Wu, Li Zhu, Xueming Qian
ACL 2026, findings
Tandem: Riding Together with Large and Small Language Models for Efficient Reasoning
Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Guojing Li, Yejing Wang, Yijun Chen, Zihao Zhao, Yixuan Luo, Hanyu Yan, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao
Nature
Towards the construction of a virtual yeast
L Qian, Z Zhou, P Zhou, Z Dong, X Zhang, Z Dai, Z Gao, S Sun, K Roy, S Wang, N Zamboni, C Boone, M Costanzo, J Li, G Liti, J Yue, M Ralser, E Williams, M Zampieri, H Jiang, T Wu, Y Wang, F Li, J Schacherer, R Sun, Z Li, Y Deng, Y Chen, Z Xie, H Lou, X Wang, L Xie, H Wen, L Chen, K Lei, G Rosenberger, X Cai, Y Wang, Q Xiao, H Shen, G Liu, L Ma, B Andrews, H Lu, K Piatkevich, Y Zhu, L Bai, Y Cai, Y Chen, W E, G Gao, F He, L Chen, S Li, H Ma, L Qiao, L Steinmetz, L Tang, T Tang, X Zhang, J Yang, Y Yang, K Yu, J Zeng, Y Zheng, B Zhou, T Guo
CVPR 2026
Step-CoT: Stepwise Visual Chain-of-Thought for Medical Visual Question Answering
Lin Fan, Yafei Ou, Zhipeng Deng, Pengyu Dai, Chongxian Hou, Jiale Yan, Yaqian Li, Kaiwen Long, Xun Gong, Masayuki Ikebe, Yefeng Zheng
CVPR 2026
Dual-Level Confidence based Implicit Self-Refinement for Medical Visual Question Answering
Meihong Pan, Yefeng Zheng
Nature Biomedical Engineering
Towards generalizable AI in medicine via Generalist–Specialist Collaboration
S He, Y Nie, H Wang, S Yang, Y Wang, Z Cai, Z Chen, Y Xu, L Wu, N Cheng, L Luo, H Xiang, X Lin, M Wu, Y Peng, G Shih, Z Xu, X Wu, Q Wang, R Chan, V Vardhanabhuti, X Duan, W Chu, Y Zheng, P Rajpurkar, K Zhang, H Chen
Paper “Learning Representation and Synergy Invariances: A Provable Framework for Generalized Multimodal Face Anti-Spoofing” has been accepted to TPAMI. Congratulations to Xun Lin and all co-authors!
2 papers got accepted by ECCV 2026. Congratulations to Junhao Jia and all co-authors.
Congratulations to sophomore Wenhan Jiang! His first-author paper “Test-Time Adaptation for ECG Classification via SQI-Gated Self-Training and Beat-Rhythm Consistency” was accepted to MICCAI 2026, bringing our lab's total acceptances this year to four.
Paper “IQE-CLIP: Instance-aware Query Embedding for Zero-/Few-shot Anomaly Detection in Medical Domain” has been accepted to TIP. Congratulations to Hong Huang, Zhijian Wu and all co-authors!
Paper “PRIME: A Pretrained Representation-Induced Model for 3D Molecules in De Novo Binder Design” has been accepted to KDD. Congratulations to Zhihua Tian, Jiale Zhou and all co-authors!
Paper “A Sliced-Wasserstein Framework on Correlation Manifolds for EEG Decoding” has been accepted to KDD. Congratulations to Chen Hu and all co-authors!
Paper “Leveraging Text-Modulated Semantic Guidance for Low-Light Endoscopic Image Enhancement ” has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. Congratulations to ZhiJian Wu and all co-authors!
1 papers got accepted by MICCAI 2026. Congratulations to Zhipeng Deng and all co-authors.
Paper “MedREK: Retrieval-Based Editing for Medical LLMs with Key-Aware Prompts” has been accepted to ICML 2026. Congratulations to Shujun Xia!
Paper “FedSemiDG: Domain Generalized Federated Semi-supervised Medical lmage Segmentation” has been accepted to Medical Image Analysis. Congratulations to Zhipeng Deng!
The Medical Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Westlake University currently has multiple openings for PhD students, postdocs, and research assistants, and we welcome motivated applicants to join our research opportunities. Candidates with a background in computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, or other related fields are encouraged to apply.