Publications

Publications, preprints and technical reports.

Main 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)

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

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

[Project Page]   [Website]

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

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]

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]

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]

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.

arXiv:2507.06181

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