Yu Cheng
Associate Professor
Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong, China
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolYu Cheng is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a decade-plus track record translating cutting-edge deep learning research into production-scale systems. Previously a Principal Researcher and tech lead at Microsoft Research Redmond and a researcher at MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab, he led teams that helped productize model-compression and generative-model techniques for core Microsoft–OpenAI products including Copilot, DALL·E-2, ChatGPT and GPT-4. His research spans model compression and efficiency, deep generative models, and large multimodal/language models, and his work has earned awards across NeurIPS, SDM and TMLR editorial leadership. He balances academic leadership—serving as Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS and ICML and area chair for major CV/NLP conferences—with industry-facing roles as chief scientist for startups focused on LLMs and video generation. An alumnus of Tsinghua and Northwestern, he maintains extensive academic affiliations across top Chinese universities, reflecting a rare blend of global research influence and hands-on product impact. Notably, he has repeatedly bridged theory and practice by taking compression and efficiency techniques from lab prototypes into the backbone of widely used multimodal AI products.
10 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computer Science at Northwestern UniversityBachelor's degree, Engineering, Bachelor's degree, Engineering at Tsinghua University
English, Chinese, SpanishProgramming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
ych133/ych133.github.io
Dec 2023 - Mar 2025
Github Pages template for academic personal websites, forked from mmistakes/minimal-mistakes
Contributions:247 pushes in 1 year 3 months
Shuangfei/doublecnn
Nov 2016 - Feb 2019
Contributions:3 pushes in 2 years 3 months
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