Ziran Yang | 杨子然

I am currently an undergraduate student majoring in Artificial Intelligence at Yuanpei College, Peking University. I am now guided by Prof. Yaodong Yang, while I am also fortunate to be a member of the Tong Class (a special pivot AI program led by Prof. Song-Chun Zhu). I am also fortunate to be advised by Prof. Zhiting Hu at UCSD and Prof. Jiawei Zhou at Stony Brook University.

Email / Google Scholar / Github

Research Overview

My research focuses on advancing foundation models beyond (semi-)supervised pretraining and imitation learning by integrating advanced algorithms from reinforcement learning and multi-agent systems, alongside principled insights from game theory and information theory, to better understand and control the behavior of complex AI systems, particularly large language and multimodal models. This includes exploring game equilibria in multi-agent settings, measuring and decomposing uncertainty, and analyzing how information flows in multimodal models to strengthen their reasoning skills and overall performance. Which is especially pertinent in the context of trustworthy AI, scalable oversight, reasoning, and LLM agents.

Publications

	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 Under Review
	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, Published in 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, Published in Neurips DB Track, 2024
	Offline Reinforcement Learning for LLM Multi-Step Reasoning Huaijie Wang, Shibo Hao, Hanze Dong, Shenao Zhang, Yilin Bao, Ziran Yang, Yi Wu Under Review

Experience

	UCSD Halicioglu Data Science Institute 2024.04 - Present Visiting Research Intern Advisor: Prof. Zhiting Hu
	PAIR Lab: PKU Alignment and Interaction Research Lab 2023.05 - Present Research Intern Advisor: Prof. Yaodong Yang
	Tong Class, Peking University 2021.09 - Present Undergraduate Student Advisor: Prof. Yixin Zhu, Prof. Song-Chun Zhu

Services

Reviewer: NeurIPS 2024, ICLR 2025, AISTATS 2025, ICML 2025, NeurIPS 2025.

Before 2022

Ministry of Education Talent Program Thesis

I was selected for the Ministry of Education Talent Program and conducted research in the math track guided by Falai Chen at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) during my high school years.

I was also selected as the Outstanding Thesis of the National Math Forum 2019 of the Ministry of Education Talent Program.

Selected Awards

2024: Peking University Excellent Undergraduate Research Award

2024: Yuanpei College Undergraduate Research Award and Academic Star Title

2024: SenseTime Scholarship Nomination Award

2024: Song Qingling Future Scholarship

2024: Fifth Yuanpei Young Scholar Award

2023: Peking University Institute for Artificial Intelligence Annual Technology Day, Best Innovation Award

2023: Peking University Learning Excellence Award

2023: Peking University Shu Qi Scholarship

2022: Peking University Learning Excellence Award

2022: Peking University Lee Wai Wing Scholarship

2021: Peking University Freshman Scholarship

2020: Chinese Mathematics Olympiad (Anhui Provincial), First Prize

2019: Ministry of Education Talent Program: annual Outstanding Thesis

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