Haifan Gong - PhD, PostDoctoral Researcher

Biography

I am currently a PostDoctoral Researcher at University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), working with Tianyu Han at AIBIL. I received my PhD degree in Computer Information Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHKSZ) in July 2025, supervised by Haofeng Li, Wan Xiang, and Dong Wang. Previously, I received my Master's degree from Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) in July 2022, supervised by Guanbin Li.

Research Interests LLM for health, domain generalization, multi-modal learning, medical imaging analysis, and bioinformatics.

News

[12/2025]

One paper was accepted to Biomaterials (Q1, IF 12.9), another paper was accepted to ESWA (Q1, IF 7.3)

[09/2025]

One paper was accepted to NeurIPS (CCF A), another paper was invited by Patterns (Cell Press)

[04/2025]

One paper was accepted to IEEE JBHI (Q1, Famous journal in medical imaging analysis)

[02/2025]

One paper was accepted to IEEE TMI (Q1, Top journal in medical imaging analysis)

[01/2025]

One paper was accepted to AAAI (CCF A) with Oral presentation (Top 4%), another paper was accepted to ISBI also with Oral presentation (Top 15%)

Publications

Journals

AI Agent-based Discovery of D-enantiomeric Antimicrobial Peptides against Multidrug-Resistant Bacterial Infection Q1, IF 12.9

Qinzhou Kong*, Yinuo Zhao*, Haifan Gong*, Luoyao Kang*, ..., and Yanqing Li.

Biomaterials, 2025

[Full Text] [Code]

Costal Cartilage Segmentation with Topology Guided Deformable Mamba: Method and Benchmark Q1, IF 7.3

Senmao Wang*, Haifan Gong*, Runmeng Cui, Boyao Wan, ..., Haiyue Jiang, and Lin Lin.

Expert Systems With Applications, 2025

[Full Text] [Code]

Boundary as the Bridge: Towards Heterogeneous Partially-labeled Medical Image Segmentation and Landmark Detection Q1, IF 11.3 Top Journal

Haifan Gong, Boyao Wan, Luoyao Kang, Xiang Wan, Lingyan Zhang, and Haofeng Li.

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2025

[Full Text] [Code]

Fetal Cerebellum Landmark Detection Based on 3D MRI: Method and Benchmark Q1, IF 6.8

Haifan Gong*, Huixian Liu*, Yitao Wang, Xiaoling Liu, Xiang Wan, Qiao Shi, and Haofeng Li.

IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2025

[Full Text] [Code]

BCNet: Bronchus Classification via Structure Guided Representation Learning Q1, IF 11.3 Top Journal

Wenhao Huang*, Haifan Gong*, Huan Zhang, Yu Wang, Xiang Wan, Guanbin Li, Haofeng Li, and Hong Shen.

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2024

[Full Text] [Data]

Unbiased Curriculum Learning Enhanced Global-Local Graph Neural Network for Protein Thermodynamic Stability Prediction Q1, IF 5.4

Haifan Gong*, Yumeng Zhang*, Chenhe Dong, Yue Wang, ..., Lanxuan Liu, Jie Xu, Guanbin Li.

Bioinformatics, 2023

[Full Text] [Code]

Bile Acid-dependent Transcription Factors and Chromatin Accessibility Determine Regional Heterogeneity of Intestinal Antimicrobial Peptides Q1, IF 15.7 Nature Press Top Journal

Yue Wang, Yanbo Yu, Lixiang Li, Mengqi Zheng, Jiawei Zhou, Haifan Gong, et al.

Nature Communications, 2023

[Full Text]

VQAMix: Conditional Triplet Mixup for Medical Visual Question Answering Q1, IF 11.3 Top Journal

Haifan Gong*, Guanqi Chen*, Mingzhi Mao, Zhen Li, and Guanbin Li.

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2022

[Full Text] [Code]

Thyroid Region Prior Guided Attention for Ultrasound Segmentation of Thyroid Nodules ESI Highly Cited

Haifan Gong, Jiaxin Chen, Guanqi Chen, Haofeng Li, Guanbin Li and Fei Chen.

Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2022

[Full Text] [Code]

Understanding the Effectiveness of Enzyme Pre-reaction State by a Quantum-based Machine Learning Model Q1, IF 7.3 Cell Press

Shenggan Luo, Lanxuan Liu, Chu-Jun Lyu, Byuri Sim, Yihan Liu, Haifan Gong, Yao Nie, Yilei Zhao.

Cell Reports Physical Science, 2022

[Full Text]

Conferences

Intermediate Domain Alignment and Morphology Analogy for Patent-Product Image Retrieval CCF A

Haifan Gong*, Xuanye Zhang*, Ruifei Zhang, Yun Su, Zhuo Li, Yuhao Du, Anningzhe Gao, Xiang Wan, Haofeng Li

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

[Full Text] [Code]

Domain Generalized Medical Landmark Detection via Robust Boundary-aware Pre-training Oral CCF A

Haifan Gong, Yu Lu, Xiang Wan, and Haofeng Li.

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025

[Full Text] [Code]

nnMamba: 3D Biomedical Image Segmentation, Classification and Landmark Detection With State Space Model Oral

Haifan Gong, Luoyao Kang, Yitao Wang, Yihan Wang, Xiang Wan, Xusheng Wu, and Haofeng Li.

IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2025

[Full Text] [Code]

Intensity Confusion Matters: An Intensity-distance Guided Loss for Bronchus Segmentation Oral CCF B

Haifan Gong*, Wenhao Huang*, Huan Zhang, Yu Wang, Xiang Wan, Hong Shen, Guanbin Li, and Haofeng Li.

IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2024

[Full Text] [Data] [Working with InferVision]

ASC: Appearance and Structure Consistency for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation CCF B

Zihang Xu*, Haifan Gong*, Xiang Wan and Haofeng Li.

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2023

[Full Text] [Code]

Visual-Attribute Prompt Learning for Progressive Mild Cognitive Impairment Prediction Early Accept CCF B

Luoyao Kang*, Haifan Gong*, Xiang Wan and Haofeng Li.

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2023

[Full Text] [Code]

Less is More: Adaptive Curriculum Learning for Thyroid Nodule Diagnosis Student Travel Award Early Accept CCF B

Haifan Gong*, Hui Cheng*, Yifan Xie, Shuangyi Tan, Guanqi Chen, Fei Chen, Guanbin Li

Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2022

[Full Text] [Code]

Cross-Modal Self-Attention with Multi-Task Pre-Training for Medical Visual Question Answering Best Poster Paper CCF B

Haifan Gong*, Guanqi Chen*, Yizhou Yu, Guanbin Li

ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), 2021

[Full Text] [Code] [中译版]

Multi-task Learning for Thyroid Nodule Segmentation with Thyroid Region Prior

Haifan Gong, Guanqi Chen, Ranran Wang, Xiang Xie, Mingzhi Mao, Yizhou Yu, Fei Chen, and Guanbin Li.

IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2021

[Full Text] [Code]

Invited & Surveys

Plug-and-play Computational Method for Advancing Natural and Biomedical Image Representation Cell Press Q1, IF 7.4

Haifan Gong#, Tianyu Han, Guanbin Li.

Patterns, 2025

[Full Text]

A Survey of Natural Language Generation ESI Highly Cited Q1, IF 28.0

Chenhe Dong, Yinghui Li, Haifan Gong, Miaoxin Chen, Junxin Li, Ying Shen, Min Yang.

ACM Computing Surveys (ACM CSUR), 2022

[Full Text] [Official Full Text]

Honors & Awards

2023 MICCAI Outstanding Reviewer Award Honorable Mentions (Top 2%) [Link]

2022 MICCAI Student Travel Award (Top 4%) [Link]

2021 ICMR Best Poster Paper Award (CCF B) [Link]

2021 ImageCLEF Medical VQA Competition, First Prize [Link]

2020 Distinguished graduates in NCU (10/10000)

Professional Activities

Editorial

Associate Editor for Discover Artificial Intelligence, Discover Imaging

Memberships

Member of IEEE, ACM, AAAI, and MICCAI.

Reviewer

npj Digital Medicine, Patterns, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, IEEE IoT Journal, The Visual Computer, etc.

Regular Reviewer for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, AAAI, MICCAI, AISTAT, etc. since 2024.