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.
News
[Jan 2026] 6 Papers Accepted to ICLR 2026: Our work on diffusion-based language models continues to advance, covering masked diffusion for code generation (DiffuCoder), latent diffusion for text reasoning (LaDiR), few-step diffusion for long text generation (FS-DFM), continuous augmentation for discrete diffusion (CADD), adaptive reward shaping for efficient reasoning (LASER), and Bayesian experimental design with LLMs (BED-LLM).
[Dec 2025] CLaRa Released! GitHub 
CLaRa bridges retrieval and generation with continuous latent reasoning.
CLaRa bridges retrieval and generation with continuous latent reasoning.
[Jul 2025] DiffuCoder Released! GitHub 
Masked diffusion for code generation with Coupled-GRPO, achieving +4.4% on EvalPlus.
Masked diffusion for code generation with Coupled-GRPO, achieving +4.4% on EvalPlus.
Seeking Research Interns and FTE
Please send me an email with your latest CV if you are working on text diffusion, continuous token representations, coding LLMs/agent, AI scientist and lookahead training and are interested in a research internship or FTE position at Apple MLR.
Please send me an email with your latest CV if you are working on text diffusion, continuous token representations, coding LLMs/agent, AI scientist and lookahead training and are interested in a research internship or FTE position 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
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