About Me

I am a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research AI Frontiers, working with Prof. Dimitris Papailiopoulos. I received my PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2025, where I was advised by Prof. Kangwook Lee. I received my Master's degree in Statistics from UW-Madison in 2020, where I was advised by Prof. Miaoyan Wang. Before joining UW-Madison, I completed my Bachelor's degree in Statistics from the School of Mathematical Sciences at Nankai University in 2019.

Selected Publications

(* equal contribution, † equal advising)

For a full list of publications, please see my Google Scholar.

ReasoningLLM

Memento: Teaching LLMs to Manage Their Own Context
Vasilis Kontonis, Yuchen Zeng, Shivam Garg, Lingjiao Chen, Hao Tang, Ziyan Wang, Ahmed Awadallah, Eric Horvitz, John Langford, Dimitris Papailiopoulos
Under Review
[Paper] [Code] [Dataset] [Blog]

LLMICLReasoningTheory

Demonstrations, CoT, and Prompting: A Theoretical Analysis of ICL
Xuhan Tong, Yuchen Zeng†, Jiawei Zhang†
Under Review
[Paper] [Code]

LLMReasoningRepresentation

ReJump: A Tree-Jump Representation for Analyzing and Improving LLM Reasoning
Yuchen Zeng*, Shuibai Zhang*, Wonjun Kang*, Shutong Wu, Lynnix Zou, Ying Fan, Heeju Kim, Ziqian Lin, Jungtaek Kim, Hyung Il Koo, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Kangwook Lee
International Conference on Machine Learning 2026 (ICML)
[Paper] [Code] [Summary]

Diffusion LLMBenchmark

ParallelBench: Understanding the Trade-offs of Parallel Decoding in Diffusion LLMs
Wonjun Kang*, Kevin Galim*, Seunghyuk Oh*, Minjae Lee, Yuchen Zeng, Shuibai Zhang, Coleman Hooper, Yuezhou Hu, Hyung Il Koo, Nam Ik Cho, Kangwook Lee
2026 International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR)
[Paper] [Code] [Summary] [Website]

PEFTState Space Model

State-offset Tuning: State-based Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for State Space Models
Wonjun Kang*, Kevin Galim*, Yuchen Zeng*, Minjae Lee, Hyung Il Koo, Nam Ik Cho
2025 Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
[Paper] [Code]

Tabular LearningTransformer

TabFlex: Scaling Tabular Learning to Millions with Linear Attention
Yuchen Zeng*, Tuan Dinh*, Wonjun Kang, Andreas Mueller
International Conference on Machine Learning 2025 (ICML) Spotlight (Top 2.6%)
[Paper] [Code]

PEFTState Space Model

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of State Space Models
Kevin Galim*, Wonjun Kang*, Yuchen Zeng*, Hyung Il Koo, Kangwook Lee
International Conference on Machine Learning 2025 (ICML)
[Paper] [Code] [Summary]

MLLMICLText-to-Image

Can MLLMs Perform Text-to-Image In-Context Learning?
Yuchen Zeng*, Wonjun Kang*, Yicong Chen, Hyung Il Koo, Kangwook Lee
2024 Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)
[Paper] [Code] [Summary] [45-Minute Talk]

PEFTTheory

The Expressive Power of Low-Rank Adaptation
Yuchen Zeng, Kangwook Lee
2024 International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR)
[Paper] [Code] [Summary] [45-Minute Talk in Chinese]

FairnessFederated Learning

Federated Learning with Local Fairness Constraints
Yuchen Zeng, Hongxu Chen, Kangwook Lee
2023 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT)
[Paper]

Fairness

Equal Improvability: A New Fairness Notion Considering the Long-Term Impact
Ozgur Guldogan*, Yuchen Zeng*, Jy-yong Sohn, Ramtin Pedarsani, Kangwook Lee
2023 International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR)
[Paper] [Code] [Summary] [5-Minute Video] [Article]

LLMPEFTMultimodal

LIFT: Language-Interfaced FineTuning for Non-Language Machine Learning Tasks
Tuan Dinh*, Yuchen Zeng*, Ruisu Zhang, Ziqian Lin, Michael Gira, Shashank Rajput, Jy-yong Sohn, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Kangwook Lee
Neural Information Processing Systems 2022 (NeurIPS)
[Paper] [Code] [Summary] [5-Minute Video] [Website] [45-Minute Talk in Chinese]

Tensor LearningClustering

Multiway clustering via tensor block models
Miaoyan Wang, Yuchen Zeng
Neural Information Processing Systems 2019 (NeurIPS)
[Paper] [Code] [3-Minute Video]

Services and Leadership

Recipient of 2024 COLM DEI Travel Scholarship
Selected to participate in Future Leaders Summit
Organizer of MLOPT Idea Seminar
Conference reviewer: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, TMLR, AISTATS

Work Experience

Meta, Fall 2024
Mentored by Dr. Yipin Zhou and Dr. Yixin Nie

Microsoft, Summer 2024
Mentored by Dr. Andreas Christian Müller

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Summer 2022
Mentored by Dr. Mikhail Yurochkin and Prof. Justin Solomon