Yifan Zhang

PhD student at Princeton University

Research Interests

You can find my publications on Google Scholar.

Selected Works

Deep Delta Learning

Yifan Zhang, Yifeng Liu, Mengdi Wang, Quanquan Gu

arXiv:2601.00417

[Project Page]   [Website]

[GRAPE] Group Representational Position Encoding

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

arXiv:2512.07805

[Project Page]   [Website]

[RPG] 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

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025 MATH-AI Workshop); See also Thinking Machines Tinker and DeepSeek V3.2

[Project Page]   [Website]

[TPA] 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]

[GPM] 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]

[AutoMathText] 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]

[MMIQC] 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]

[Proposer-Verifier] Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models

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

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

[Project Page]   [Website]

(* denotes equal contribution)

Recent Publications

View all publications

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)

(* denotes equal contribution)

Professional Activities

Teaching

  • Teaching Assistant, Machine Learning for Yao class, IIIS, Tsinghua University

Academic Services

  • Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, COLM, AAAI, AISTATS
  • Journal Reviewer: ACM TKDD, Neural Computing, Neural Networks