Tianyi Zhou

Towards AI that automatically pushes its learning frontier, turns experience into reusable expertise, cycles between generalist and specialist, explores the unknown, and stays aligned with humans and the world.

Visiting Faculty @ MBZUAI · Prev. Assistant Professor @ UMD CS & Research Scientist @ Google · Ph.D. UW CS

I lead the Tianyi Lab, where we study how machines can learn the way strong learners do in an open world: choosing what to learn and when, cycling between generalists and specialists, and staying aligned with humans and the world. Our current work spans LLM reasoning, unified multimodal models, agents, and human–AI–world alignment, with applications in education, science, design, and digital/embodied agents.

Recent recognition includes the ACL 2026 SAC Highlight Award and the 2026 eAA Best Research Award (more on the CV). I have advised 14 Ph.D. students, including a 2026 Apple Scholar in AI/ML (Ming Li) and a 2025 UMD Flagship Fellow (Dongping Chen); the group page has the full list.

Research themes

Human–AI–World alignment
Self-evolving / sustaining AI
Interpretability and foundations

Papers by topic are on the research page; the complete list by year is under publications.

news last 12 months · full archive

Jul 2026 4 papers have been accepted by COLM 2026, 2 papers have been accepted by ECCV 2026.
Jul 2026 Schoenfeld’s Anatomy of Mathematical Reasoning by Language Models has been selected as “SAC Highlight” on ACL 2026.
Jun 2026 Item Difficulty Modeling Using Fine-tuned Small and Large Language Models won 2026 Best Research Award from the International EAssessment Association (eAA).
May 2026 6 ICML (1 Oral + 1 Spotlight) + 5 ACL (1 Oral) + 5 ICLR + 1 ACM CAIS + 1 EACL + 1 AAAI have been accepted in 2026.
Mar 2026 I will serve as the Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026 and most ARR circles (ACL, EMNLP, etc.).
Jan 2026 I am visiting MBZUAI, UAE as a Visiting Assistant Professor for one year and have experienced the 2026 Middle East Conflict.
Jan 2026 Congratulations to Ming Li on being awarded 2026 Apple Scholar in AI/ML!
Nov 2025 I am going to serve as an Area Chair of ICML 2026.

Selected Work (2024–2026) all publications · by topic

  1. Skip a Layer or Loop It? Learning Program-of-Layers in LLMsOral
    Ziyue Li, Yang Li, and Tianyi Zhou
    In Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
  2. WestWorld: A Knowledge-Encoded Scalable Trajectory World Model for Diverse Robotic SystemsSpotlight
    Yuchen Wang, Jiangtao Kong, Sizhe Wei, and 6 more authors
    In Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
  3. ACL
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    Schoenfeld’s Anatomy of Mathematical Reasoning by Language ModelsOral · SAC Highlight
    Ming Li, Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, and 2 more authors
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
  4. WALL-E: World Alignment by NeuroSymbolic Learning improves World Model-based LLM Agents
    Siyu Zhou, Tianyi Zhou, Yijun Yang, and 4 more authors
    In The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
  5. ACL
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    What Happened in LLMs Layers when Trained for Fast vs. Slow Thinking: A Gradient PerspectiveOral
    Ming Li, Yanhong Li, and Tianyi Zhou
    In The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025
  6. Your Mixture-of-Experts LLM Is Secretly an Embedding Model For FreeOral
    Ziyue Li and Tianyi Zhou
    In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
  7. ACL
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    Superfiltering: Weak-to-Strong Data Filtering for Fast Instruction-Tuning
    Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Shwai He, and 5 more authors
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024
  8. InstructZero: Efficient Instruction Optimization for Black-Box Large Language Models
    Lichang Chen, Jiuhai Chen, Heng Huang, and 2 more authors
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024
  9. Embodied Multi-Modal Agent trained by an LLM from a Parallel TextWorld
    Yijun Yang, Tianyi Zhou, Kanxue Li, and 6 more authors
    In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
  10. BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models – Architecture, Training and Dataset
    Jiuhai Chen, Zhiyang Xu, Xichen Pan, and 10 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09568, 2025

Highly-cited Work

  1. HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination and Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models
    Tianrui Guan, Fuxiao Liu, Xiyang Wu, and 9 more authors
    In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
  2. FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients
    Yue Tan, Guodong Long, Lu Liu, and 4 more authors
    In The Thirty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2022
  3. DiSAN: Directional self-attention network for rnn/cnn-free language understanding
    Tao Shen, Tianyi Zhou, Guodong Long, and 3 more authors
    In The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 2018
  4. GoDec: Randomized Low-rank & Sparse Matrix Decomposition in Noisy Case
    Tianyi Zhou and Dacheng Tao
    In Twenty-Eighth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Bellevue, WA, USA, 2011
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