I am Zhiyuan Liang, who received my bachelor degree from University of Science and Technology of China. During my undergraduate studies, I was fortunate to do research at USTC Lab of Data Science, UNC AIMING Lab, and NUS HPC AI Lab.
My research interest lies at the intersection of Large Language Models and Efficient Machine Learning. I am actively exploring foundation model pretraining, LLM reasoning and agentic adaptation, as well as other interesting directions.
🔥 News
- 2026.09: 🥳 KSA got accepted to EMNLP 2026 findings! Congratulations to all!
- 2025.09: 🥳 DnD and other 2 papers accpeted to NeurIPS 2025! Thanks all collaborators!
- 2025.06: 🎉 I received bachelor degree from USTC!
📝 Selected Publications

Kwai Summary Attention Technical Report
Kwai OneRec Team (Core Contributor)
We introduce Kwai Summary Attention (KSA), an efficient attention mechanism for long-context modeling that compresses distant history into learnable summary tokens while retaining fine-grained access to recent context. It features:
- Reducing sequence-level KV-cache growth from O(N) to O(N/R), reflected by 2.5× smaller KV cache than Full Attention at 128K context.
- Combining KSA and Full Attention in a hybrid architecture through pre-training experiments.
- Design efficient CUDA & Triton kernels for better training throughput and optimized memory consumption.

Drag-and-Drop LLMs: Zero-Shot Prompt-to-Weights
Zhiyuan Liang†, Dongwen Tang, Yuhao Zhou, Xuanlei Zhao, Mingjia Shi,
Wangbo Zhao, Zekai Li, Peihao Wang, Konstantin Schürholt, Damian Borth
Michael M. Bronstein, Yang You, Zhangyang Wang†, Kai Wang† († project lead)
We introduce Drag-and-Drop LLMs (DnD) 🥳, a prompt-conditioned parameter generator that enables training-free adaptation of large language models. It features:
- Producing task-specific LoRA matrices from unlabeled task prompts.
- Generating weights for novel tasks in seconds, achieving up to 12,000× lower overhead.
- Outperforming the strongest training LoRAs by up to 30% on various zero-shot benchmarks.

REPA Works Until It Doesn’t: Early-Stopped, Holistic Alignment Supercharges Diffusion Training
Ziqiao Wang∗, Wangbo Zhao∗, Yuhao Zhou, Zekai Li, Zhiyuan Liang, Mingjia Shi, Xuanlei Zhao, Pengfei Zhou, Kaipeng Zhang†, Zhangyang Wang, Kai Wang†, Yang You (* equal contribution, † corresponding author)
Representation alignment (REPA) that matches Diffusion Transformer (DiT) hidden features to a self-supervised encoder (e.g. DINO)—dramatically accelerates the early epochs but plateaus or even de grades performance later. We trace this failure to a capacity mismatch in gradient directions of repsentation and denoising task, and introduce HASTE (Holistic Alignment with Stage-wise Termination for Efficient training), a two-phase DiT training schedule that keeps the help and drops the hindrance. On ImageNet 256×256, it a 28× reduction in optimization steps. HASTE also improves text-to-image DiTs on MS-COCO, demonstrating to be a simple yet principled recipe for efficient diffusion training across various tasks.

Cream: Consistency regularized self-rewarding language models
Zhaoyang Wang, Weilei He, Zhiyuan Liang, Xuchao Zhang, Chetan Bansal, Ying Wei, Weitong Zhang, Huaxiu Yao
Consistency Regularized sElf-rewarding lAnguage Model (CREAM) is a self-rewarding framework that improves LLM alignment without human-labeled preference data. It addresses the key issue of reward bias in iterative self-training by:
- Formulating a generalized iterative preference fine-tuning framework with explicit consistency regularization.
- Leveraging reward stability across iterations to produce more reliable preference labels.
- Achieving superior alignment performance and higher reward consistency, even as smaller LLMs (e.g., 7B) face diminishing returns from standard self-rewarding.
📖 Educations
- 2021.09 - 2025.06, Bachelor of Engineering, Talent Class, University of Science and Technology of China.
💼 Internship
- 2026.03 - 2026.08, Kuaishou OneRec Team.
💻 Research Experience
- 2023.03 - 2024.06, University of Science and Technology of China. PI: Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He.
- 2024.05 - 2024.10, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. PI: Huaxiu Yao.
- 2024.08 - 2025.08, National University of Singapore. PI: Yang You.