Yifan Zhang

About Me

I am Yifan Zhang, a graduate student at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, working with Prof. Andrew C Yao. I recently visited the University of California, Los Angeles, working with Prof. Quanquan Gu. Previously, I completed my undergraduate studies at Yuanpei College, Peking University.

Feel free to reach out via email! If you have any questions or topics you'd like to discuss, please let me know!

Research Interests

  • Physics of Language Models
  • Reasoning and Formal Mathematics

You can find my publications on Google Scholar.

Selected Works

On the Design of KL-Regularized Policy Gradient Algorithms for LLM Reasoning

Yifan Zhang*, Yifeng Liu*, Huizhuo Yuan, Yang Yuan, Quanquan Gu, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2505.17508

Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need

Yifan Zhang*, Yifeng Liu*, Huizhuo Yuan, Zhen Qin, Yang Yuan, Quanquan Gu, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2501.06425

Beyond Bradley-Terry Models: A General Preference Model for Language Model Alignment

Yifan Zhang*, Ge Zhang*, Yue Wu*, Kangping Xu, Quanquan Gu

ICML 2025

Autonomous Data Selection with Zero-shot Generative Classifiers for Mathematical Texts

Yifan Zhang*, Yifan Luo*, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

ACL 2025 Findings

Augmenting Math Word Problems via Iterative Question Composing

Haoxiong Liu*, Yifan Zhang*, Yifan Luo, Andrew C Yao

AAAI 2025

Beyond Squared Error: Exploring Loss Design for Enhanced Training of Generative Flow Networks

Rui Hu*, Yifan Zhang*, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang

ICLR 2025 Spotlight

On the Diagram of Thought

Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2409.10038

Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models

Yifan Zhang, Jingqin Yang, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2308.04371

(* denotes equal contribution, † denotes corresponding authors)

Publications & Preprints (Full List)

On the Design of KL-Regularized Policy Gradient Algorithms for LLM Reasoning

Yifan Zhang*, Yifeng Liu*, Huizhuo Yuan, Yang Yuan, Quanquan Gu, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2505.17508

FormalMATH: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models

Zhouliang Yu*, Ruotian Peng*, Keyi Ding*, Yizhe Li, Zhongyuan Peng, Minghao Liu, Yifan Zhang, Zheng Yuan, Huajian Xin, Wenhao Huang, Yandong Wen, Ge Zhang, Weiyang Liu

arXiv:2505.02735

Autonomous Data Selection with Zero-shot Generative Classifiers for Mathematical Texts

Yifan Zhang*, Yifan Luo*, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

ACL 2025 Findings

Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need

Yifan Zhang*, Yifeng Liu*, Huizhuo Yuan, Zhen Qin, Yang Yuan, Quanquan Gu, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2501.06425

Beyond Bradley-Terry Models: A General Preference Model for Language Model Alignment

Yifan Zhang*, Ge Zhang*, Yue Wu*, Kangping Xu, Quanquan Gu

ICML 2025

Augmenting Math Word Problems via Iterative Question Composing

Haoxiong Liu*, Yifan Zhang*, Yifan Luo, Andrew C Yao

AAAI 2025

Beyond Squared Error: Exploring Loss Design for Enhanced Training of Generative Flow Networks

Rui Hu*, Yifan Zhang*, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang

ICLR 2025 Spotlight

Scaling Image Tokenizers with Grouped Spherical Quantization

Jiangtao Wang, Zhen Qin, Yifan Zhang, Tao Hu, Björn Ommer, Rania Briq, Stefan Kesselheim

arXiv:2412.02632

Training and Evaluating Language Models with Template-based Data Generation

Yifan Zhang

DATA-FM Workshop @ ICLR 2025

On the Diagram of Thought

Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2409.10038

SEAL: Simultaneous Label Hierarchy Exploration and Learning

Zhiquan Tan*, Zihao Wang*, Yifan Zhang*

TMLR 2024

Information Flow in Self-Supervised Learning

Zhiquan Tan, Jingqin Yang, Weiran Huang, Yang Yuan†, Yifan Zhang†

ICML 2024

Matrix Information Theory for Self-Supervised Learning

Yifan Zhang*, Jingqin Yang*, Zhiquan Tan*, Weiran Huang, Yang Yuan

ICML 2024

Meta prompting for ai systems

Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

BGPT Workshop @ ICLR 2024

Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models

Yifan Zhang*, Jingqin Yang*, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2308.04371

EffCause: Discover Dynamic Causal Relationships Efficiently from Time-Series

Yicheng Pan, Yifan Zhang, Xinrui Jiang, Meng Ma, Ping Wang

TKDD 2024

Contrastive Learning Is Spectral Clustering On Similarity Graph

Zhiquan Tan*, Yifan Zhang*, Jingqin Yang*, Yang Yuan

ICLR 2024

Coded real number matrix multiplication for on-device edge computing

Zhiquan Tan, Dingli Yuan, Yifan Zhang, Zhongyi Huang

SPL 2023

Relationmatch: matching in-batch relationships for semi-supervised learning

Yifan Zhang*, Jingqin Yang*, Zhiquan Tan*, Yang Yuan

arXiv:2305.10397

Trade-off Between Efficiency and Consistency for Removal-based Explanations

Yifan Zhang, Haowei He*, Zhiquan Tan, Yang Yuan

NeurIPS 2023

(* denotes equal contribution, † denotes corresponding authors)