home page of

Danqi Liao

About Danqi,

I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at Yale University, advised by Prof. Smita Krishnaswamy.

My research interests include geometric, manifold learning, and deep learning. Specifically, I am interested in studying the characteristics that make expressive and generalizable embeddings and developing efficient and principled methods to achieve such representations. I am also interested in AI/ML for bioscience.

I graduated Magna Cum Laude from Northwestern University and obtained my master's degree from Princeton University. While at Princeton, I worked on computer perception and video recognition in Prof. Olga Russakovsky's lab.

Before Princeton, I worked as a software engineer at Meta for two years.

Publications

Geometry-Aware Generative Autoencodersfor Warped Riemannian Metric Learning and Generative Modeling on Data Manifolds

Xingzhi Sun *, Danqi Liao *, Kincaid MacDonald, Yanlei Zhang, Guillaume Huguet, Guy Wolf, Ian Adelstein,Tim G. J. Rudner, Smita Krishnaswamy

AISTATS, 2025 |ICML GRaM, 2024 | arXiv

[paper][code]

DiffKillR: Killing and Recreating Diffeomorphisms for Cell Annotation in Dense Microscopy Images

Chen Liu *, Danqi Liao *, Alejandro Parada-Mayorga *, Alejandro Ribeiro, Marcello DiStasio, Smita Krishnaswamy

ICASSP, 2025 | arXiv, 2024

[paper][code]

Assessing Neural Network Representations During Training Using Noise-resilient Diffusion Spectral Entropy

Danqi Liao*, Chen Liu*, Ben Christensen, Alexander Tong, Guillaume Huguet, Guy Wolf, Maximilian Nickel, Ian Adelstein, Smita Krishnaswamy

CISS, 2024 | ICML TAG-ML, 2023

[paper][code]

Sentence Embeddings using Supervised Contrastive Learning

Danqi Liao

Arxiv Preprint, 2021

[paper][code]

Selective Feature Aggregation for Single Frame Supervised Temporal Action Localization

Danqi Liao

Master Thesis, 2022

[paper]

Projects

Attention mechanism on GPU

Danqi Liao

My CUDA c implementation of forwad pass of regular Attention and FlashAttention.

[code]

Peer to Peer Proxy Network

Danqi Liao

P2P proxy network aims to protect user privacy and hide their online identity by forwarding their network requests randomly.

[code]

Kademlia Distributed Hash Table

Danqi Liao

My implementation for Kademlia DHT, a distributed hash table for decentralized peer-to-peer computer networks.

[code]

Teaching (as TA/Head TA)

CPSC452: Deep Learning Theory and Applications , Yale, Spring 25

CPSC474: Computer Vision and Biological Perception, Yale, Fall 24

COS429: Computer Vision, Princeton University, Fall 21

COS326: Functional Programming, Princeton University, Fall 20

EECS324 Operating System, Northwestern University, Spring 18

EECS321 Programing Language, Northwestern University, Fall 17

COS324: Advanced Programming Technique, Princeton University, Spring 22

COS226: Data Structures & Algorithms, Princeton University, Spring 20