I am Zhiyuan Liang, who is a PhD student at University of Michigan supervised by Prof. Joyce Yan-Ran Wang and Prof. Wei Lu.

Previously, I received my bachelor degree from University of Science and Technology of China. During my undergraduate studies, I was fortunate to intern 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.

đŸ”„ News

  • 2026.02: 🎓 Start my new journey at Umich, go blue!
  • 2025.09: đŸ„ł DnD and other 2 papers accpeted to NeurIPS 2025! Thanks all collaborators!
  • 2025.06: 🎉 I received bachelor degree from USTC!

📝 Selected Publications

NeurIPS 2025
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Drag-and-Drop LLMs: Zero-Shot Prompt-to-Weights sym

Zhiyuan Liang†, Dongwen Tang, Yuhao Zhou, Xuanlei Zhao, Mingjia Shi

Wangbo Zhao, Zekai Li, Peihao Wang, Konstantin SchĂŒrholt, Damian Borth

Michael M. Bronstein, Yang You, Zhangyang Wang†, Kai Wang† († project lead)

We introduce Drag-and-Drop LLMs (DnD) đŸ„ł, 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.
[paper] [code] [abstract]
NeurIPS 2025
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REPA Works Until It Doesn’t: Early-Stopped, Holistic Alignment Supercharges Diffusion Training sym

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.

[paper] [code] [abstract]
ICLR 2025
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Cream: Consistency regularized self-rewarding language models sym

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.
[paper] [code] [abstract]

📖 Educations

  • 2021.09 - 2025.06, Bachelor Degree in Artifical Intelligence’s Talent Class, University of Science and Technology of China.

đŸ’» Internships

  • 2023.03 - 2024.06, University of Science and Technology of China, Undergraduate Research Intern. PI: Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He.
  • 2024.05 - 2024.10, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Research Intern. PI: Huaxiu Yao.
  • 2024.08 - 2025.08, National University of Singapore, Research Intern. PI: Yang You.