Mr Yichao Cai

Higher Degree by Research Candidate

School of Computer Science and Information Technology

College of Engineering and Information Technology


I develop machine learning methods for learning meaningful and controllable representations of the world, robust to noise, bias, and incomplete supervision. My work lies at the intersection of representation learning, multimodal modeling, and causality, guided by a central question:

"What makes a representation aligned with human conceptual understanding and amenable to control?"

I combine theoretical modeling with empirical analysis of vision–language systems to design interpretable, reliable representations that move beyond scale alone.

Current directions include:

  • Causal and counterfactual modeling of multimodal signals
  • Mitigating bias and misalignment in cross-modal training
  • Language-guided identifiability and semantic control

My long-term goal is to enable trustworthy, human-aligned AI systems through principled representation learning.

Language Competency
Chinese (Mandarin) Can read, write, speak, understand spoken and peer review
English Can read, write, speak, understand spoken and peer review

Date Institution name Country Title
2016 - 2019 Wuhan University of Technology China M.S.
2012 - 2016 Wuhan University of Technology China B.Eng.

Year Citation
2018 Cai, Y., Li, D., Zhou, X., & Mou, X. (2018). Robust Drivable Road Region Detection for Fixed-Route Autonomous Vehicles Using Map-Fusion Images. SENSORS, 18(12), 15 pages.
DOI WoS13 Europe PMC4

Year Citation
2024 Cai, Y., Liu, Y., Zhang, Z., & Shi, J. Q. (2024). CLAP: Isolating Content from Style Through Contrastive Learning with Augmented Prompts. In Lecture Notes in computer science Vol. 15079 (pp. 130-147). Milan, Italy: Springer Nature Switzerland.
DOI Scopus5

Year Citation
2025 Cai, Y., Liu, Y., Gao, E., Jiang, T., Zhang, Z., Hengel, A. V. D., & Shi, J. Q. (2025). On the Value of Cross-Modal Misalignment in Multimodal Representation
Learning.
  • Head Tutor, Statistical Machine Learning (Semester 2, 2025) @ The University of Adelaide
  • Teaching Assistant, Using Machine Learning Tools (Trimester 2, 2025) @ The University of Adelaide
  • Teaching Assistant, Concepts in AI and ML (Trimester 1, 2025) @ The University of Adelaide

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