Yifan Zhang's Publications

Peer-Reviewed

Main Publications

Group Representational Position Encoding

Yifan Zhang, Zixiang Chen, Yifeng Liu, Zhen Qin, Huizhuo Yuan, Kangping Xu, Yang Yuan, Quanquan Gu, Andrew C Yao

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)

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

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026); see also Thinking Machines Tinker and DeepSeek V3.2

Project Page Website

CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization

Zhongyuan Peng*, Yifan Yao*, Kaijing Ma*, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, et al.

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)

Tensor Product Attention Is All You Need

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

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight)

Project Page Website

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

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

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025 Findings)

Project Page Website

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

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

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)

Project Page Website

Augmenting Math Word Problems via Iterative Question Composing

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

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)

Project Page Website

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 Spotlight)

Information Flow in Self-Supervised Learning

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

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)

Matrix Information Theory for Self-Supervised Learning

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

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)

Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models

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

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

Project Page Website

Contrastive Learning Is Spectral Clustering On Similarity Graph

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

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

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)

(* denotes equal contribution, † denotes corresponding authors)

Workshops

Selected Workshops

A Markov Categorical Framework for Language Modeling

Yifan Zhang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025) AI4Math Workshop

Training and Evaluating Language Models with Template-based Data Generation

Yifan Zhang

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025) DATA-FM Workshop

Project Page Website

Meta Prompting for AI Systems

Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024) BGPT Workshop

Project Page Website

Preprints

Selected Preprints & Technical Reports

Self-Distilled Policy Gradient

Yifeng Liu*, Shiyuan Zhang*, Yifan Zhang*, Quanquan Gu

arXiv:2606.04036

Project Page Website

Fast-Weight Attention for Continual Learning

Yifan Zhang et al.

Preprint

Project Page Website

Interactive Benchmarks

Baoqing Yue*, Zihan Zhu*, Yifan Zhang*†, Jichen Feng*, Hufei Yang*, Mengdi Wang†

arXiv:2603.04737

Project Page Website

FlashSampling: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Sampling

Tomas Ruiz*, Zhen Qin*, Yifan Zhang†, Xuyang Shen, Yiran Zhong, Mengdi Wang†

arXiv:2603.15854

Project Page Website

Deep Delta Learning

Yifan Zhang, Yifeng Liu, Mengdi Wang, Quanquan Gu

arXiv:2601.00417

Project Page Website

Web World Models

Jichen Feng*, Yifan Zhang*, Chenggong Zhang*, Yifu Lu*, Shilong Liu, Mengdi Wang

arXiv:2512.23676

Project Page Website

CryptoBench: A Dynamic Benchmark

Jiacheng Guo*, Suozhi Huang*, Zixin Yao*, Yifan Zhang*, Yifu Lu*, Jiashuo Liu*, et al.

arXiv:2512.00417

Higher-order Linear Attention

Yifan Zhang, Zhen Qin, Mengdi Wang, Quanquan Gu

arXiv:2510.27258

Project Page Website

Reinforcement Learning from Compiler and Language Server Feedback

Yifan Zhang, et al.

arXiv:2510.22907, see also Claude Code v2.0.74

Project Page Website

FormalMATH: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models

Zhouliang Yu*, Ruotian Peng*, Keyi Ding*, Yizhe Li, Zhongyuan Peng, Minghao Liu, Yifan Zhang, et al.

arXiv:2505.02735

Scaling Image Tokenizers with Grouped Spherical Quantization

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

arXiv:2412.02632

On the Diagram of Thought

Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew C Yao

arXiv:2409.10038