Jun 05, 2026	Gave a talk on recursive models at the Simons Institute Multi-Program AI Reunion.
May 19, 2026	Serving as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.
May 13, 2026	Received a $600K NSF CAREER Award for work on architecture-aware optimization theory for deep learning.
May 01, 2026	Gave a Research at TTIC talk on optimizer geometry in modern deep learning.
Apr 30, 2026	Recursive Models for Long-Horizon Reasoning accepted at ICML 2026!
Jan 26, 2026	2 papers accepted by ICLR 2026!
Jan 22, 2026	1 paper accepted by AISTATS 2026!
Jan 12, 2026	Co-organizing the Latent & Implicit Thinking – Going Beyond CoT Reasoning workshop at ICLR 2026!
Sep 18, 2025	1 paper accepted by NeurIPS 2025!
Sep 18, 2025	Received a $3M DARPA AIQ award with Sanjeev Arora and Wei Hu for work on skill composition and emergent behaviors in language models.
Jun 23, 2025	Excited to co-organize and participate in Midwest Machine Learning Symposium at Uchicago!
Jun 09, 2025	Presenting PENCIL at 2025 Annual Meeting of IDEAL Institute.
May 05, 2025	Serving as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2025
May 01, 2025	4 papers accepted by ICML 2025!
Jan 31, 2025	Serving as Area Chair for ICML 2025
Jan 22, 2025	5 papers accepted by ICLR 2025!
Apr 07, 2024	Zhiyuan and Professor Sanjeev Arora (Princeton University) were jointly named recipients of a Superalignment Fast Grant from Open AI to further investigate the “weak-to-strong generalization” problem.
Sep 01, 2023	Officially joining TTIC as a tenure-track assistant professor.