My name is Tunyu Zhang (ๅผ ็„žๅฎ‡). I am a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. My research focuses on trustworthy and efficient language model systems, including uncertainty estimation in LLM reasoning and efficient decoding for diffusion language models. Previously, I obtained my bachelorโ€™s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2025.

๐Ÿ”ฅ News

  • 2026.01: ย ๐ŸŽ‰๐ŸŽ‰ Our paper TokUR was accepted to ICLR 2026
  • 2025.09: ย ๐ŸŽ‰๐ŸŽ‰ Our paper TokUR on Bayesian LLM reasoning was accepted to the NeurIPS 2025 Workshop FoRLM!
  • 2025.08: ย ๐ŸŽ‰๐ŸŽ‰ I will join Professor Dimitris Metaxasโ€™s group to pursue my PhD degree at Rutgers.

๐Ÿ“ Publications

where โ€œ*โ€ denotes equal contribution

Preprint
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T3D: Trajectory Self-Distillation via Direct Discriminative Optimization for Efficient Diffusion Language Models
Tunyu Zhang*, Xinxi Zhang*, Ligong Han, Haizhou Shi, Xiaoxiao He, Zhuowei Li, Hao Wang, Kai Xu, Akash Srivastava, Hao Wang, Vladimir Pavlovic, Dimitris Metaxas
Paper | Code | Slides

  • T3D is a training framework for efficient diffusion language models via trajectory self-distillation.
  • T3D uses Direct Discriminative Optimization (DDO) to replace mode-covering objectives with a mode-seeking training signal.
  • The framework enables aggressive few-step generation while preserving full-step diffusion capabilities and reasoning performance.
ICLR 2026
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TokUR: Token-Level Uncertainty Estimation for Large Language Model Reasoning
Tunyu Zhang*, Haizhou Shi*, Yibin Wang, Hengyi Wang, Xiaoxiao He, Zhuowei Li, Haoxian Chen, Ligong Han, Kai Xu, Huan Zhang, Dimitris Metaxas, Hao Wang
Paper | Code

  • We propose TokUR, a framework for token-level uncertainty estimation tailored for LLM reasoning.
  • TokUR introduces a low-rank stochastic perturbation mechanism to approximate predictive distributions efficiently.
  • The framework enables more reliable multi-step reasoning, and provides uncertainty-aware signals for downstream tasks.
ACL 2025
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Multimodal needle in a haystack: Benchmarking long-context capability of multimodal large language models
Hengyi Wang, Haizhou Shi, Shiwei Tan, Weiyi Qin, Wenyuan Wang, Tunyu Zhang, Akshay Nambi, Tanuja Ganu, Hao Wang

Paper | Code

  • MMNeedle provides a systematic evaluation framework for long-context multimodal understanding.
  • It enables controlled benchmarking of retrieval and reasoning over large visual contexts, and reveals robustness challenges in current multimodal LLMs.

Complex Networks

๐ŸŽ– Honors and Awards

  • 2025.06 Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award, University of Science and Technology of China
  • 2022.12 Second Prize, Asia and Pacific Mathematical Contest in Modeling (APMCM)
  • 2022.05 Outstanding Student Scholarship (Gold Award), University of Science and Technology of China

๐Ÿ“– Educations

  • 2021.09 - 2025.06, Univeristy of Science and Technology of China, Hefei.

๐Ÿ’ฌ Invited Talks

  • 2026.02, Few-Step Diffusion Language Models (Red Hat AI Innovation Team, Random Sample Talk) Slides.

๐Ÿ’ป Internships

  • 2024.06 - 2025.08, Research Assistant at Rutgers University
  • 2023.06 - 2024.05, Research Assistant at University of Hong Kong (HKU)