I am Yusen Peng, a final year undergraduate Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) student at The Ohio State University (OSU), graduating in Spring 2026. I am actively seeking PhD position in Fall 2026 in vision-language models and multimodal learning.

Publications 🚀

CE-Bench: A Contrastive Evaluation Benchmark of Interpretability with Sparse Autoencoders

Alex Gulko*, Yusen Peng*, Sachin Kumar.
BlackboxNLP Workshop @ EMNLP, 2025
[Arxiv] | [Github]

CascadeFormer: A Family of Two-stage Cascading Transformers for Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Yusen Peng, Alper Yilmaz.
arXiv preprint 2025; also under review at ICLR 2026
[Arxiv] | [Github]

Lower-quality public housing corresponds to elevated flood risk and social disadvantage

Woi Sok Oh, Kelsea Best, Meri Davlasheridze, Yusen Peng
Under review at Earth’s Future, 2025
[Paper]

Ongoing Projects ⭐️

DRIP: Dynamic token Reduction vIsion transformer via Pooling for efficient multimodal learning

Advisor: Dr. Sachin Kumar
[Github]

SVD-π3: Efficient Visual Geometry Learning via Singular Value Decomposition

Mentor: Haoxuan Wang; Advisor: Dr. Yan Yan
[Github]

CascadeFormer-based Agentic Anomaly Detection for Surveillance Purpose

Advisor: Dr. Alper Yilmaz
Ongoing Honors Undergraduate Thesis
Oral Defense in April 2026
[Github]

Awards 🏅

• Undergraduate Research Scholarship 2025
  • $2,200 scholarship awarded based on my Honors Thesis proposal @ OSU
• Department Nominee, CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award (2025)
  • One of four students nominated by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering @ OSU

Academic Service 📚

• Conference Reviewer @ NeurIPS
  • reviewed 3 papers at NeurIPS 2025 Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop

Campus Poster Presentations 👨‍👨‍👦‍👦

• SIGNAL: A Comprehensive Time Series Analysis Library
  • The DATUM Lab | Advisor: Dr. John Paparrizos;
  • Poster presented at the CSE Annual Research Expo 2025 at The Ohio State University
• A Comparison of CSV, HDF5, Zarr, and netCDF4 in Performing Common I/O Operations
  • Advisor: Dr. Suren Byna; GitHub
  • Poster presented at the CSE Annual Research Expo 2024 at The Ohio State University

AI/ML Competitions 💡

• NASA Airport Throughput Prediction Challenge 2024 (Top 10 Finalist)
  • Ranked 9th out of 51 teams in the final Leaderboard

Teaching 🧑🏻‍🏫

• Teaching Assistant for CSE 2331: Data Structures and Algorithms (Aug 2024 – Present)

• Teaching Assistant for CSE 2221: Software Components (Aug 2023 – Dec 2023)

Internships 👨‍💻

• Software Engineer Intern @ Thaddeus Resource Center (May 2025 – Present)

• Software Engineer Intern @ Y STEM and Chess Inc (Jan 2025 – Apr 2025)

• Website Frontend Intern @ National STEM Honor Society (May 2024 – Sept 2024)

• Mobile Frontend Intern @ Resilience, Inc (Dec 2023 – Aug 2024)

Extra-curriculars 🔮

• Competitive Programming Club (CPC) @ The Ohio State University
  • Served as 23-24 Problem Engineer and 24-25 Communication Director