Ziran Yang   |   杨子然

I am a final-year undergraduate at Yuanpei College, Peking University and an incoming Ph.D. student at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Princeton University, advised by Prof. Chi Jin. I have also been fortunate to work with Prof. Yaodong Yang at Peking University and Prof. Zhiting Hu at UCSD.

Email  /  Google Scholar  /  Github

profile photo
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,
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
ICLR 2025 Workshop: Reasoning and Planning for LLMs (Oral)




Experience

UCSD Halicioglu Data Science Institute
2024.04 - 2024.11
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

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