PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jifeng Dai

Also known as 代季峰

Jifeng Dai is a tenured associate professor of electronic engineering at Tsinghua University whose models cover object detection, autonomous-driving perception and multimodal foundation models. After a Tsinghua B.S. in 2009 and Ph.D. in 2014, he worked at Microsoft Research Asia from 2014 to 2019 and was first author of R-FCN in 2016 and Deformable Convolutional Networks in 2017. Between 2019 and 2022 he was Executive Research Director at SenseTime Research, and he coauthored BEVFormer in 2022 and UniAD, which won a CVPR 2023 Best Paper Award. From 2022 to 2025 he was Lead Researcher at Shanghai AI Lab; he coauthored InternVL in 2023 and received the First Prize of the Natural Science Award of the China Society of Image and Graphics in 2025. His current research focuses on agentic AI and continual learning.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2009–2014

    Automation degrees at Tsinghua

    He earns a B.S. in 2009 and a Ph.D. in 2014 from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University, with Professor Jie Zhou as doctoral advisor. From 2012 to 2013 he is a visiting student at the VCLA lab of the University of California, Los Angeles, working with Song-Chun Zhu and Ying-Nian Wu.

  2. 2014–2019

    R-FCN and Deformable ConvNets

    He works in the Visual Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia from 2014 to 2019 and is promoted to Principal Research Manager. R-FCN, a region-based fully convolutional network for object detection, appears in 2016 with him as first author; Deformable Convolutional Networks follow in 2017, adding learned offsets to the spatial sampling locations of convolutions.

  3. 2019–2022

    Research director at SenseTime

    In 2019 he becomes Executive Research Director at SenseTime Research, headed by Professor Xiaogang Wang, and leads core research teams on visual representation learning and self-driving until 2022.

  4. 2022–2023

    BEVFormer and UniAD

    In March 2022 he coauthors BEVFormer, a framework that learns unified bird's-eye-view representations with spatiotemporal transformers for autonomous-driving perception. He is also a coauthor of UniAD, the full-stack driving framework from the CVPR 2023 paper "Planning-Oriented Autonomous Driving", which wins a Best Paper Award in 2023.

  5. 2022–2025

    Shanghai AI Lab and InternVL

    From September 2022 to February 2025 he is Lead Researcher at Shanghai AI Lab, leading joint teams from the lab and SenseTime Research on multimodal foundation models. In December 2023 he coauthors InternVL, a vision-language foundation model that scales its vision model to 6 billion parameters and aligns it with a language model. The open-source model has over 50 million downloads.

  6. 2025

    A CSIG natural science prize

    In 2025 he receives the First Prize of the Natural Science Award of the China Society of Image and Graphics (CSIG).

  7. May 2025–January 2026

    MiroMind and MiroThinker

    From May 2025 to January 2026 he works at MiroMind, an AGI lab founded by Shanda, which stops operating in China in January 2026. In November 2025 he is a coauthor of MiroThinker v1.0, an open-source research agent from the MiroMind team for tool-augmented reasoning and information seeking.

  8. As of October 2026

    Tenured associate professor at Tsinghua

    He joins the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University as full-time faculty in July 2022 and is tenured in 2024. As an Associate Professor, he focuses his research on agentic AI and continual learning.

Career

  1. Since 2022Tsinghua UniversityAssociate Professor
  2. 2025–2026MiroMind
  3. 2022–2025Shanghai Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryLead Researcher
  4. 2019–2022SenseTimeExecutive Research Director
  5. 2014–2019Microsoft Research AsiaPrincipal Research Manager
  6. 2012–2013University of California, Los AngelesVisiting Student

Education

  1. 2014Tsinghua UniversityPh.D.
  2. 2009Tsinghua UniversityB.S.

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Jifeng Dai. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Jifeng Dai. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  3. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Jifeng Dai. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Tsinghua University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Jifeng Dai yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Personal Information – Jifeng Dai, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University web.ee.tsinghua.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Jifeng Dai – personal homepage jifengdai.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Deformable Convolutional Networks arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Planning-Oriented Autonomous Driving (CVPR 2023 Open Access Repository) openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. MiroThinker: Pushing the Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Research Agents via Model, Context, and Interactive Scaling arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.