arXiv:2606.04036
About Me
I am a PhD candidate at Princeton University and a Princeton AI Lab Fellow, working with Prof. Mengdi Wang, Prof. Andrew Yao, and Prof. Quanquan Gu, where my research focuses on building scalable and capable large language models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models. My work explores methods to improve LLM reasoning and agentic AI via reinforcement learning, advance data curation and algorithms for foundation models, and develop new attention mechanisms, positional encodings, and model architectures.
Previously, I was a visiting PhD student at the UCLA AGI Lab, and a Top Seed researcher with the Seed Foundation Model Team, working on LLM and MLLM pretraining and scaling.
If you are interested in my research or projects, I would be happy to discuss potential collaborations via email.
Research Interests
You can find my publications on Google Scholar, and my writing at Yifan's Blog.
Selected Works
Preprint
arXiv:2603.15854
arXiv:2601.00417
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026); see also Thinking Machines Tinker and DeepSeek V3.2
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
(* denotes equal contribution, † denotes corresponding authors)
Recent Publications
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026); see also Thinking Machines Tinker and DeepSeek V3.2
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight)
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025 Findings)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025 Spotlight)
(* denotes equal contribution)
Blog Highlights
arXiv:2606.04036 · June 4, 2026
Open Source · April 2, 2026
arXiv:2603.16039 · March 16, 2026
Preprint · March 9, 2026
arXiv:2603.15854 · February 28, 2026
Yifan's Blog · January 12, 2026
arXiv:2601.00417 · January 1, 2026
Yifan's Blog · December 27, 2025
Yifan's Blog · December 16, 2025
Yifan's Blog · December 15, 2025
ICLR 2026 · December 8, 2025
arXiv:2510.27258 · October 30, 2025
arXiv:2510.22907 · October 24, 2025
ICML 2025 AI4Math Workshop · July 25, 2025
ICLR 2026 · May 23, 2025
NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight · January 11, 2025
ICML 2025 · October 3, 2024
Professional Activities
- Teaching Assistant, Machine Learning for Yao class, IIIS, Tsinghua University
- Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, COLM, AAAI, AISTATS
- Journal Reviewer: TMLR, IEEE TDSC, ACM TKDD, ACM TIST, Neuralcomputing, Neural Networks
- William G. Bowen Merit Fellowship at Princeton University (only one in each academic division)
- 2025 Stanford University-Elsevier World's Top 2% Scientist