Yizhe Zhang

About Me

I am a Staff Research Scientist at Apple MLR, primarily working on Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Before joining Apple, I have been at Meta AI and Microsoft Research, working on natural language generation and NLP pre-training. I received my Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Duke University. Before that, I received my B.Sc. degree in Physics from Nanjing University, Kuang Yaming Honors School, in 2011.

Seeking Research Interns!
Please send me an email with your latest CV if you are a senior PhD student working on text diffusion, continuous token representations, coding LLMs/agent, AI scientist and lookahead training and are interested in a research internship at Apple MLR.

Research Interests

My recent research focuses on pushing LLMs to gain more intuition and strong generalization, especially in the code domain:

Code LLM & Agents Building intelligent coding assistants and autonomous agents that understand and generate code
Long-Horizon Planning Enabling LLMs to perform complex, multi-step reasoning and planning over extended sequences
RAG & Reasoning with Continuous Tokens Retrieval-augmented generation and reasoning systems using continuous token representations
Text Diffusion Models Advancing non-autoregressive generation through diffusion-based approaches
Coding-Based AI Scientist Developing AI systems that can autonomously discover knowledge through code

Academic Service

Area Chair / Senior Program Committee:

ICLR 2023-2025 ICML 2022-2025 NeurIPS 2020-2025 ACL 2020-2021 EMNLP 2022 NAACL 2023 AAAI 2018-2021

Editorial Roles:

  • Action Editor for Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR, since 2023)
  • Action Editor for ACL Rolling Review (ARR, since 2023)

Organization:

  • Organization Committee Member, ACL 2020