Yijie Zheng

zhengyijie23@mails.ucas.ac.cn

Education

Sept 2023 - Jun 2026	University of Chinese Academy of Sciences M.S. in Signal and Information Processing GPA: 3.81/4
Sept 2019- Jun 2023	Beijing Jiaotong University B.S. in Communication Engineering GPA: 3.91/4

Research Experience

Cross-modal Geosparial Representation Learning

Sentinel-2 Image Retrieval with Global, Cross-modal Embeddings [WebAPP]
Y. Zheng, W. Wu, B. Wu, G. Li, M. Czerkawski, and K. Klemmer, EGU General Assembly, 2026 (under review).

Developed EarthEmbeddingExplorer, a web app for cross-modal satellite image retrieval via language, image, and geolocation queries.

Instruction-Oriented Segmentation for Remote Sensing Imagery

InstructSAM: A Training-Free Framework for Instruction-Oriented Remote Sensing Object Recognition [project]
Y. Zheng, W. Wu, Q. Li, X. Wang, X. Zhou, A. Ren, J. Shen, L. Zhao, G. Li, X. Yang, in Proc. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst. (NeurIPS), 2025.

Proposed InstructSAM, a training-free framework that enables object counting, detection, and segmentation in remote sensing imagery through user-defined instructions.
Achieved SOTA performance in open-vocabulary, open-ended, and open-subclass settings.
Reduced inference time from linear to near-constant complexity relative to generative foundation models.

Biodiversity Conservation with Remote Sensing

The IEEE GRSS Student Grand Challenge: The Fourth Edition on Whale Monitoring from Space
A. Camps, P. Gamba, D. Kunkee,..., Y. Zheng, et al., IEEE Geosci. Remote Sens. Mag., 2026 (in press).

Published in IEEE GRSM Education in Remote Sensing section, concluding the research and educational impact of the 4th Student Grand Challenge.

Beluga Whale Detection from Satellite Imagery with Point Labels [paper] [code] [IGARSS Session]
Y. Zheng, J. Yang, Y. Chen, Y. Wang, Y. Lu, G. Li, in Proc. IEEE Int. Geosci. Remote Sens. Symp. (IGARSS), 2025.

Collaborated with Dr. Cortney Watt from Fisheries and Oceans Canada and supervised by Prof. Adriano Camps from the IEEE GRSS Student Challenge Committee.
Developed a proptable segmentation pipeline for labeling beluga whales and harp seals bounding boxes using point annotations.

A Review of Deep Learning Techniques for Monitoring Cetaceans in Aerial and Satellite Images [project]

Reviewed the landscape of related work, cetacean monitoring tasks, and their computer vision solutions.

Ionospheric Remote Sensing

Segmentation and Edge Detection for Ionogram Automatic Scaling [paper] [code]
Y. Zheng, X. Wang, Y. Luo, H. Tian, Z. Chen, in Proc. Int. Conf. Mach. Learn., Cloud Comput. Intell. Min. (MLCCIM), 2022.

Enhanced ionogram structure segmentation using edge detection, improving the accuracy of ionogram scaling.

A Benchmark for Ionogram Real-Time Object Detection Based on MMYOLO [doc] [code]
Y. Zheng, MMYOLO Application Examples, 2023

Formulated ionogram parameter extraction as an object detection problem and established a benchmark.

Teaching Experience

Spring 2023 Teaching Assistant, OpenMMLab AI Camp, Shanghai AI Lab

Competitions

2025 1st place in ModelScope AI + Research Open Source Challenge ($4300)
2023-2025 4th IEEE GRSS Student Grand Challenge Research Grant ($8000)
2024 3rd place in iFLYTEK High-Resolution Remote Sensing Image Content Recognition and Retrieval Challenge
2022 Honorable Mentioned in Mathematical Contest in Modeling
2022 1st prize in MathorCup Mathematical Modeling Challenge
2020 1st prize in National College Students Mathematics Competition

Awards and Honors

2020, 2022	National Scholarship Awarded by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. Acceptance rate: 1%.
2023	Highest Honors, BS Communication Engineering, BJTU Graduated from Beijing Jiaotong University with a BS with highest honors. Top 10 university-wide.
2023	OpenMMLab Active Contributor Awarded for the significant contributions to the OpenMMLab ecosystem.

Service and Leadership

2025 Co-chair & Secretary, 3rd International Training Courses on Space Technology for Global Challenges
2025 Reviewer, Advances in Space Research
2025 Member, International Whaling Commission Scientific Committee correpondence group on "Satellites to Study Whales"
2024-2025 Vice Chair, IEEE GRSS Student Branch Chapter (Beijing Section)
2023-2024 Chair, Scientific Expetition Association of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

SELECTED Talks

Sept 2025	Training-Free Instruction-Oriented Segmentation for Remote Sensing Objects 1st GAIA Symposium on Geospatial AI and Applications with Foundation Models Sofia, Bulgaria
Aug 2025	Deep Learning-Powered Cetacean Monitoring from the Sky University of Wollongong NSW, Australia
Sept 2024	A Review on AI-Ready Earth Observation Data 9th Scientific Data Conference, CODATA China Chengdu, China

Language Skills

Chinese (native), English (IELTS 7.5)