Ziran Yang

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Princeton University, advised by Prof. Chi Jin. Previously, I did my undergraduate at Yuanpei College, Peking University. I do research at the intersection of reinforcement learning and LLMs.

Email  /  Google Scholar  /  Github

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Recent Interests

I view exploration as the core challenge in RL, and test-time search being necessary to achieve it for LLM agents. The key technical problem is how search procedures and expert decision-making systems can be internalized as reasoning ability, rather than remaining external scaffolding. I see two tightly coupled aspects: backfilling expert search behavior into the model through learning, and on-the-fly calibration that lets the model assess uncertainty and decide when to search, explore, or trust its own prediction.

Publications

Goedel-Prover-V2: The Strongest Open-Source Theorem Prover to Date
Yong Lin*, Shange Tang*, Bohan Lyu*, Ziran Yang*, Jui-Hui Chung*, Haoyu Zhao*, Lai Jiang*, Yihan Geng*, Jiawei Ge, Jingruo Sun, Jiayun Wu, Jiri Gesi, David Acuna, Kaiyu Yang, Hongzhou Lin*, Yejin Choi, Danqi Chen, Sanjeev Arora, Chi Jin*,
AI4MATH@ICML 2025 (Oral)


Understanding the Sources of Uncertainty for Large Language and Multimodal Models
Ziran Yang, Shibo Hao, Hao Sun, Lai Jiang, Qiyue Gao, Yian Ma, Zhiting Hu
ICLR 2025 Workshop: Quantify Uncertainty and Hallucination in Foundation Models


From Uncertainty to Trust: Enhancing Reliability in Vision-Language Models with Uncertainty-Guided Dropout Decoding
Yixiong Fang*, Ziran Yang*, Zhaorun Chen, Zhuokai Zhao, Jiawei Zhou
NeurIPS 2025


Evolving Diverse Red-team Language Models in Multi-round Multi-agent Games
Chengdong Ma*, Ziran Yang*, Hai Ci, Jun Gao, Minquan Gao, Xuehai Pan, Yaodong Yang
Under Review


Panacea: Pareto Alignment via Preference Adaptation for LLMs
Yifan Zhong*, Chengdong Ma*, Xiaoyuan Zhang*, Ziran Yang, Qingfu Zhang, Siyuan Qi, Yaodong Yang,
NeurIPS 2024


SafeSora: Towards Safety Alignment of Text2Video Generation via a Human Preference Dataset
Josef Dai, Tianle Chen, Xuyao Wang, Ziran Yang, Taiye Chen, Jiaming Ji, Yaodong Yang,
NeurIPS 2024 (DB Track)


Offline Reinforcement Learning for LLM Multi-Step Reasoning
Huaijie Wang, Shibo Hao, Hanze Dong, Shenao Zhang, Yilin Bao, Ziran Yang, Yi Wu
ACL 2025; ICLR 2025 Workshop: Reasoning and Planning for LLMs (Oral)




Experience


ByteDance Seed
2025.05 - 2025.08
Research Intern
Working on RL for Tool-using Agentic LLMs.
UC San Diego
2024.04 - 2024.11
Research Intern
Advisor: Prof. Zhiting Hu
PAIR Lab: PKU Alignment and Interaction Research Lab
2023.05 - Present
Research Intern
Advisor: Prof. Yaodong Yang
Services

  • Reviewer: NeurIPS 2024, ICLR 2025, AISTATS 2025, ICML 2025, NeurIPS 2025, AAAI 2026.

  • Selected Awards

  • 2024: Peking University Excellent Undergraduate Research Award
  • 2024: SenseTime Scholarship Nomination Award
  • 2024: Fifth Yuanpei Young Scholar Award
  • 2021: Peking University Freshman Scholarship
  • 2019: Ministry of Education Talent Program: annual Outstanding Thesis

  • This template is a modification to Jon Barron's website.