Curriculum Vitae
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Research Interests
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 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
Professional Experience
May 2022 – Present
Staff Research Scientist
Apple MLR, Cupertino, CA
Manager: Navdeep Jaitly
Using code domain as a testbed for planning and reasoning. Recent work includes DiffuCoder (diffusion-based code generation) and SWE-Agent (autonomous code agents).
September 2021 – May 2022
Research Scientist
Facebook AI (Meta AI), Menlo Park, CA
Manager: Yashar Mehdad
Worked on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and summarization systems.
February 2018 – September 2021
Senior Researcher
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA
Manager: Bill Dolan
Worked on generative dialogue models. Created DialoGPT, an open-sourced pretrained chat model.
Recent Talks
- October 2025Towards Understanding and Building Intuition for Language Model• University of Pennsylvania, Guest lecturer
• BAIR NLP workshop, UC Berkeley, Invited speaker
• University of Washington, NLP seminar, Invited speaker - July 2025Bidirectional Language ModelApple Natural Language Understanding workshop, Invited speaker
Selected Preprints
Haoqiang Kang, Yizhe Zhang, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Nicklas Majamaki, Navdeep Jaitly, Yi-An Ma, Lianhui Qin. LaDiR: Latent Diffusion Enhances LLMs for Text Reasoning. arXiv (2025) [paper]
Huangjie Zheng, Shansan Gong, Ruixiang Zhang, Tianrong Chen, Jiatao Gu, Mingyuan Zhou, Navdeep Jaitly, Yizhe Zhang. Continuously Augmented Discrete Diffusion Model for Categorical Generative Modeling. arXiv (2025)
Amin Karimi Monse, Nikhil Bhendawade, Manuel Rafael Ciosici, Dominic Culver, Yizhe Zhang, Irina Belousova. FS-DFM: Fast and Accurate Long Text Generation with Few-Step Diffusion Language Models. arXiv (2025)
Shansan Gong, Ruixiang Zhang, Huangjie Zheng, Jiatao Gu, Navdeep Jaitly, Lingpeng Kong, Yizhe Zhang. DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation. arXiv (2025) [paper]
Wei Liu, Ruochen Zhou, Yiyun Deng, Yuzhen Huang, Junteng Liu, Yuntian Deng, Yizhe Zhang, Junxian He. Learn to Reason Efficiently with Adaptive Length based Reward Shaping. arXiv (2025)
Deepro Choudhury, Sinead Williamson, Adam Goliński, Ning Miao, Freddie Bickford Smith, Michael Kirchhof, Yizhe Zhang, Tom Rainforth. BED-LLM: Intelligent Information Gathering with LLMs and Bayesian Experimental Design. arXiv (2025)
Yizhe Zhang, Richard Bai, Zijin Gu, Ruixiang Zhang, Jiatao Gu, Emmanuel Abbe, Samy Bengio, Navdeep Jaitly. What makes the preferred thinking direction for LLM in Multi-choice Questions? arXiv (2025)
Xiaogeng Liu, Zhiyuan Yu, Yizhe Zhang, Ning Zhang, Chaowei Xiao. Automatic and Universal Prompt Injection Attacks Against Large Language Models. arXiv (2024)
Professional Services
Area Chair / Senior PC
- NeurIPS (since 2020)
- ICML (since 2022)
- ICLR (since 2023)
- ACL (2020-2021)
- EMNLP (2022)
- NAACL (2023)
- AAAI (2018-2021)
Editorial Roles
- Action Editor, TMLR (since 2023)
- Action Editor, ARR (since 2023)
Organization
- Organization Committee Member, ACL 2020
Reviewer
- NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR
- ACL, EMNLP, NAACL
- AISTATS, AAAI
Awards & Honors
- Stanford Top 2% Scientists (since 2023)
- NeurIPS Top 5% Reviewer Award (2018)
- Department Fellowship, Duke University (2013-2014)
- National Excellent Graduate Scholarship - Top 1% (2012)
- Travel Awards: NeurIPS (2015, 2016), ICML (2017), ICDM (2016), IJCAI (2016), AAAI (2016)
Teaching Experience
Advanced Machine Learning (STA571)
Duke University
Instructor: Katherine Heller
Probabilistic Machine Learning (CS571)
Duke University
Instructor: Cynthia Rudin
Technical Skills
PyTorch TensorFlow Python C/C++ Java Lua MATLAB R