Hi! I’m Yifan Zeng and my name in Chinese is 曾一凡 . I’m currently a second-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at Oregon State University, where I’m fortunate to be advised by Huazheng Wang.

My research focuses on the robust planning and decision-making of large language models (LLMs). I’m passionate about developing Agentic AI through multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, and preference optimization.

Before joining OSU, I worked as a Research Scientist at a technology startup, where I carried out AI solutions in the real-world using deep learning and computer vision. My previous research spans object detection, medical image analysis, representation learning, and AI4Science. I received my B.Eng. in Data Science at Zhuhai College of Jilin University in 2023, , ranking first in my department with a 3.84/4.0 GPA.

Publications & Preprints

TreeBoN: Enhancing Inference-Time Alignment with Speculative Tree-Search and Best-of-N Sampling

Jiahao Qiu✧, Yifu Lu✧, Yifan Zeng, Jiacheng Guo, Jiayi Geng, Huazheng Wang, Kaixuan Huang, Yue Wu, Mengdi Wang

arXiv preprint • arXiv:2410.16033

A Common Pitfall of Margin-based Language Model Alignment: Gradient Entanglement

Hui Yuan✧, Yifan Zeng✧, Yue Wu✧, Huazheng Wang, Mengdi Wang, Liu Leqi✧

ICLR 2025 • arXiv:2410.13828

LLM-RankFusion: Mitigating Intrinsic Inconsistency in LLM-based Ranking

Yifan Zeng✧, Ojas Tendolkar✧, Raymond Baartmans✧, Qingyun Wu, Huazheng Wang, Lizhong Chen

NeurIPS 2024 Workshop SFLLM • arXiv:2406.00231

AutoDefense: Multi-Agent LLM Defense against Jailbreak Attacks

Yifan Zeng✧, Yiran Wu✧, Xiao Zhang, Huazheng Wang, Qingyun Wu

NeurIPS 2024 Workshop SafeGenAi • arXiv:2403.04783

Modeling the Time Evolution of Compact Binary Systems with Machine Learning

Jianqi Yan✧, Junjie Luo✧, Yifan Zeng, Alex P Leung, Jie Feng, Hong-Hao Zhang, Weipeng Lin

The Astrophysical Journal • 973 (2), 163 • 2024-09

Enhanced object detection in pediatric bronchoscopy images using YOLO-based algorithms with CBAM attention mechanism

Jianqi Yan, Yifan Zeng, Junhong Lin, Zhiyuan Pei, Jinrui Fan, Chuanyu Fang, Yong Cai

Heliyon • 10 (12) • 2024-06

Task-Level Consistency Semi-supervised Based Domain Adaptation for Lung Nodules Segmentation

Yifan Zeng, Aohui Pang, Wei Lv, Xiaolin Zhu

Computer and Information Science • 181-196 • 2022-11

A challenge of deep‐learning‐based object detection for hair follicle dataset

Wei Lv, Tao Chen, Yifan Zeng, Weihong Liu, Chuying Huang

Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology • 22 (9), 2565-2578 • 2023-09

✧ Equal Contribution / Leading Contributors
The papers listed are sorted by the completion date of the initial version.

Misc.