Publications

Publications, preprints and technical reports.

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)

[Project Page]   [Website]

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)

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]

Selected Preprints & Technical Reports

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

Zhen Qin*, Tomas Ruiz*, 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, Quanquan Gu

arXiv:2510.27258

[Project Page]   [Website]

Language Server CLI Empowers Language Agents with Process Rewards

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