About Me

I am Yifan Zhang, a CS graduate (MPhil) student at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Andrew Chi-Chih Yao and Prof. Yang Yuan. For the academic year 2024-2025, I am a visiting graduate student at UCLA, advised by Prof. Quanquan Gu. Previously, I completed my undergraduate studies at Yuanpei College, Peking University.

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

Research Topics

• Foundation Models (Language Models)
• AI Reasoning & AI Safety
• Representation Learning

Selected Publications

• Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Yifeng Liu*, Huizhuo Yuan, Qin Zhen, Yang Yuan, Quanquan Gu, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.06425
  Featured as Huggingface Daily Papers: https://huggingface.co/papers/2501.06425

• Augmenting Math Word Problems via Iterative Question Composing [code]
  Haoxiong Liu*, Yifan Zhang*, Yifan Luo, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)
  Former International Conference on Learning Representations (DPFM Workshop @ ICLR 2024)

• Beyond Squared Error: Exploring Loss Design for Enhanced Training of Generative Flow Networks
  Rui Hu*, Yifan Zhang*, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)

• General Preference Modeling with Preference Representations for Aligning Language Models [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Ge Zhang*, Yue Wu*, Kangping Xu, Quanquan Gu
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02197
  Featured as Huggingface Daily Papers: https://huggingface.co/papers/2410.02197

• Scaling Image Tokenizers with Grouped Spherical Quantization [code]
  Jiangtao Wang, Zhen Qin, Yifan Zhang, Tao Hu, Björn Ommer, Rania Briq, Stefan Kesselheim
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.02632
  Featured as Huggingface Daily Papers: https://huggingface.co/papers/2412.02632

• Autonomous Data Selection with Language Models for Mathematical Texts [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Yifan Luo*, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  International Conference on Learning Representations (DPFM @ ICLR 2024)
  Featured as Huggingface Daily Papers (AutoMathText, LMs as zero-shot generative verifiers): https://huggingface.co/papers/2402.07625

• Information Flow in Self-Supervised Learning [code]
  Zhiquan Tan, Jingqin Yang, Weiran Huang, Yang Yuan†, Yifan Zhang†
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)

• Matrix Information Theory for Self-Supervised Learning [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Zhiquan Tan*, Jingqin Yang*, Weiran Huang, Yang Yuan
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)

• Meta Prompting for AI Systems [code]
  Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  International Conference on Learning Representations (BGPT @ ICLR 2024)

• Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Jingqin Yang*, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  International Conference on Learning Representations (BGPT @ ICLR 2024)

• Contrastive Learning Is Spectral Clustering On Similarity Graph [code]
  Zhiquan Tan*, Yifan Zhang*, Jingqin Yang*, Yang Yuan
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024)

• Trade-off Between Efficiency and Consistency for Removal-based Explanations [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Haowei He*, Zhiquan Tan, Yang Yuan
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)

( * denotes equal contribution, † denotes corresponding authors )

Publications & Preprints (Full List)

• Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Yifeng Liu*, Huizhuo Yuan, Qin Zhen, Yang Yuan, Quanquan Gu, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.06425
  Featured as Huggingface Daily Papers: https://huggingface.co/papers/2501.06425

• Augmenting Math Word Problems via Iterative Question Composing [code]
  Haoxiong Liu*, Yifan Zhang*, Yifan Luo, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)
  Former International Conference on Learning Representations (DPFM Workshop @ ICLR 2024)

• Beyond Squared Error: Exploring Loss Design for Enhanced Training of Generative Flow Networks
  Rui Hu*, Yifan Zhang*, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)

• General Preference Modeling with Preference Representations for Aligning Language Models [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Ge Zhang*, Yue Wu*, Kangping Xu, Quanquan Gu
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02197
  Featured as Huggingface Daily Papers: https://huggingface.co/papers/2410.02197

• Beyond Squared Error: Exploring Loss Design for Enhanced Training of Generative Flow Networks
  Rui Hu*, Yifan Zhang*, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.02596

• Scaling Image Tokenizers with Grouped Spherical Quantization [code]
  Jiangtao Wang, Zhen Qin, Yifan Zhang, Tao Hu, Björn Ommer, Rania Briq, Stefan Kesselheim
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.02632
  Featured as Huggingface Daily Papers: https://huggingface.co/papers/2412.02632

• Training and Evaluating Language Models with Template-based Data Generation [code]
  Yifan Zhang et al.
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.18104

• On the Diagram of Thought
  Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.10038

• SEAL: Simultaneous Label Hierarchy Exploration and Learning
  Zhiquan Tan*, Zihao Wang*, Yifan Zhang*
  Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

• Autonomous Data Selection with Language Models for Mathematical Texts [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Yifan Luo*, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  International Conference on Learning Representations (DPFM @ ICLR 2024)
  Featured as Huggingface Daily Papers: https://huggingface.co/papers/2402.07625

• Information Flow in Self-Supervised Learning [code]
  Zhiquan Tan, Jingqin Yang, Weiran Huang, Yang Yuan†, Yifan Zhang†
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)

• Matrix Information Theory for Self-Supervised Learning [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Zhiquan Tan*, Jingqin Yang*, Weiran Huang, Yang Yuan
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)

• Meta Prompting for AI Systems [code]
  Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  International Conference on Learning Representations (BGPT @ ICLR 2024)

• Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Jingqin Yang*, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
  International Conference on Learning Representations (BGPT @ ICLR 2024)

• Contrastive Learning Is Spectral Clustering On Similarity Graph [code]
  Zhiquan Tan*, Yifan Zhang*, Jingqin Yang*, Yang Yuan
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024)

• EffCause: Discover Dynamic Causal Relationships Efficiently from Time-Series [code]
  Yicheng Pan, Yifan Zhang, Xinrui Jiang, Meng Ma, Ping Wang
  ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data

• Coded real number matrix multiplication for on-device edge computing
  Zhiquan Tan, Dingli Yuan, Yifan Zhang, Zhongyi Huang
  IEEE Signal Processing Letters

• Trade-off Between Efficiency and Consistency for Removal-based Explanations [code]
  Yifan Zhang*, Haowei He*, Zhiquan Tan, Yang Yuan
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)

Professional Activities

Teaching

• Teaching Assistant, Machine Learning for Yao Class, IIIS, Tsinghua University, 2021 Fall
• Teaching Assistant, Machine Learning for Yao Class, IIIS, Tsinghua University, 2022 Fall

Academic Services

• Conference Reviewer for ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, AISTATS
• Journal Reviewer for TKDD, INS, NEUNET, NEUCOM, JER, JOLT, COR, MAVIC

Talks

• Invited talk on General Preference Modeling with Preference Representations (slides), November 2024
• Invited talk on Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models (slides), September 2023
• Invited talk on Contrastive Learning Is Spectral Clustering (slides), May 2023, Microsoft Research, Asia