Yiwei Chen
中文

Good afternoon

HKUST · Computer Science and Engineering

Yiwei Chen

Marine Vision Intelligence

PhD student at CSE, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

New MarineChat · Ask the ocean anything

“Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining.”

01

About

Sunlit zone ·
0 – 200 m

I am Yiwei Chen, also Jackson, a third-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

I work on computer vision for marine and biology studies: recognition, and the problems that sit between 2D and 3D vision. At HKUST I work closely with Prof. Ziqiang Zheng (UESTC) and am supervised by Prof. Sai-Kit Yeung.

If you would like to talk about the work, or about a collaboration, write to jackson.chen.yiwei@gmail.com or ychenmb@connect.ust.hk.

02

Projects

Sunlit zone ·
Live on the web

Live · Web app · 2026

MarineChat

Ask the ocean anything.

Drop in an underwater photo: MarineChat finds every creature, describes each one and answers your questions. Built on MarineInst.

  • Instance segmentation
  • Captions
  • Species Q&A
  • Annotation export
Try MarineChat

03

Publications

Twilight zone ·
200 – 1,000 m

RA-L · 2026

MaskGuide: Efficient Distillation for Deployable Lightweight Segmentation in Marine Environments

Xinrui Wu, Ziqiang Zheng, Yiwei Chen*, Zeyu Ma, Yang Yang, Sai-Kit Yeung

04

News

Midnight zone ·
1,000 – 4,000 m

  1. Launched MarineChat, a public web app built on MarineInst.
  2. Recognized as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS 2026.
  3. MaskGuide accepted at RA-L.
  4. ORCA accepted at WACV 2026, as an oral.
  5. Started the PhD at HKUST.
  6. MarineInst received an Oral Presentation Award at ECCV 2024.
  7. MarineInst accepted at ECCV 2024.

05

Experience

Abyssal zone ·
4,000 m +

Education

PhD, Computer Science and Engineering
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

2024 – present

MSc, Information Technology
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

2023 – 2024

BEng, Telecommunications
Huazhong University of Science and Technology

2019 – 2023

As an undergraduate at the School of Electronic Information and Communications, HUST, I joined Prof. Xiaojun Hei’s innovation program and completed my final-year project with Prof. Xinggang Wang.

Teaching

COMP 2211 Exploring Artificial Intelligence

Spring 2025

COMP 2211 Exploring Artificial Intelligence

Fall 2025

MSBD 6000Q Vision Language Models for Vision Tasks

Fall 2025

Visiting

Visiting student, UESTC, Chengdu

Aug – Nov 2026

Awards

Top Reviewer, NeurIPS 2026

2026

Outstanding PG Teaching Assistant Honorable Mention
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST

2025 – 26
Outstanding PG Teaching Assistant Honorable Mention certificate, HKUST Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
Outstanding PG Teaching Assistant Honorable Mention, 2025–26.

Seafloor reached

© 2026 Yiwei Chen · HKUST

Every creature is alive: drag it anywhere, or click it to talk. Pop bubbles, poke clouds, brush the plankton, and switch on Vision (the eye up top, or V) to see the sea the way a detector does.

Creature replies come from free models via LLM7 or Pollinations, then DeepSeek, with offline answers as a last resort.

Surface

Mission success!

Seafloor reached · 4,800 m