Tong Zhang
Professor
Studies machine learning theory and algorithms, including optimization, reinforcement learning and alignment of large language models.
Tong Zhang's lab at UIUC works on learning theory & optimization, reinforcement learning and large language models. 104 papers since 2023, 89 at top venues, mostly NeurIPS and ICML. 10 PhD students and 3 master's students. 36 alumni, most often to Microsoft and NVIDIA. Applications close .
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 27/ year
- at T1 venues
- 86%
- PhD students
- 10
- MS students
- 3
- alumni listed
- 36
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 15 papers2026 · T1 11 · collecting
- 26 papers2025 · T1 23
- 37 papers2024 · T1 31
- 26 papers2023 · T1 24
T1 venuesOtherVenues: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Learning theory & optimization34 papers
- Reinforcement learning29 papers
- Large language models22 papers
- alignment4 papers
- studies machine0 papers
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
202615 papers
- ICLR (T1)"A Sharp KL-Convergence Analysis for Diffusion Models under Minimal Assumptions
- COLT (T1)"Almost linear convergence under minimal score assumptions: Quantized transition diffusion
- ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol"An Improved Autoregressive Evaluation Paradigm for Large Language Models
- ACL (T1)"Contextual Relevance and Adaptive Sampling for LLM-Based Document Reranking
- ICLR (T1)"GAR: Generative Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Formal Theorem Proving
- CVPR (T1)"GT-SVJ: Generative-Transformer-Based Self-Supervised Video Judge For Efficient Video Reward Modeling
- ACL (T1)"GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas
- ICLR (T1)"Lean4Physics: Comprehensive Reasoning Framework for College-level Physics in Lean4
- Findings of ACL"OpenGenAlign: A Preference Dataset and Benchmark for Trustworthy Reward Modeling in Open-Ended, Long-Context Generation
- TPAMI (T1)"PMGT-VR: A Decentralized Proximal-Gradient Algorithmic Framework With Variance Reduction
- EACL"RAG-RL: Advancing retrieval-augmented generation via RL and curriculum learning
- ICLR (T1)"RM-R1: Reward modeling as reasoning
202526 papers
- ICLR (T1)"AdaGrad under Anisotropic Smoothness: A Fine-Grained Analysis
- NeurIPS (T1)"ASGO: Adaptive Structured Gradient Optimization
- ICLR (T1)"Building Math Agents with Multi-Turn Iterative Preference Learning
- ICML (T1)"Catoni Contextual Bandits are Robust to Heavy-tailed Rewards
- ICML (T1)"EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents
- EMNLP (T1)"FANS: Formal Answer Selection for LLM Natural Language Math Reasoning Using Lean4
- ACL (T1)"From Lists to Emojis: How Format Bias Affects Model Alignment
- IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing"Fully First-Order Methods for Decentralized Bilevel Optimization
- Mathematics of Operations Research"GEC: A unified framework for interactive decision making in MDP, POMDP, and beyond
- NeurIPS (T1)"GUI-Actor: Coordinate-Free Visual Grounding for GUI Agents
- EMNLP (T1)"Let's Reason Formally: Natural-Formal Hybrid Reasoning Enhances LLM's Math Capability
- TMLR (T1)"Localize-and-Stitch: Efficient Model Merging via Sparse Task Arithmetic
202437 papers
- ICLR (T1)"Accelerated Convergence of Stochastic Heavy Ball Method under Anisotropic Gradient Noise
- ACL (T1)"Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models
- ACL (T1)"Arithmetic Control of LLMs for Diverse User Preferences: Directional Preference Alignment with Multi-Objective Rewards
- NeurIPS (T1)"Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning with Interactive Data Collection: Fundamental Hardness and Near-Optimal Algorithm
- NeurIPS (T1)"Do CLIP Models Always Generalize Better than ImageNet Models?
- ACL (T1)"Enhancing Dialogue State Tracking Models through LLM-backed User-Agents Simulation
- Annals of Statistics"Environment Invariant Linear Least Squares
- JMLR (T1)"Fast Rates in Pool-Based Batch Active Learning
- ICML (T1)"Faster Sampling via Stochastic Gradient Proximal Sampler
- COLT (T1)"Faster Sampling without Isoperimetry via Diffusion-based Monte Carlo
- The Thirty-eight Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track"Image Textualization: An Automatic Framework for Generating Rich and Detailed Image Descriptions
- Findings of EMNLP"Interpretable Preferences via Multi-Objective Reward Modeling and Mixture-of-Experts
202326 papers
- NeurIPS (T1)"A theoretical analysis of optimistic proximal policy optimization in linear markov decision processes
- Findings of EMNLP"Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought from Labeled Data
- ICML (T1)"Beyond uniform lipschitz condition in differentially private optimization
- TMLR (T1)"Black-box prompt learning for pre-trained language models
- AISTATS (T1)"Catalyst Acceleration of Error Compensated Methods Leads to Better Communication Complexity
- ICML (T1)"Corruption-Robust Algorithms with Uncertainty Weighting for Nonlinear Contextual Bandits and Markov Decision Processes
- NeurIPS (T1)"Corruption-Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning with General Function Approximation
- EMNLP (T1)"DetGPT: Detect What You Need via Reasoning
- EMNLP (T1)"Doolittle: Benchmarks and Corpora for Academic Writing Formalization
- NeurIPS (T1)"Double pessimism is provably efficient for distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning: Generic algorithm and robust partial coverage
- NeurIPS (T1)"Double Randomized Underdamped Langevin with Dimension-Independent Convergence Guarantee
- ICML (T1)"Generalized Polyak Step Size for First Order Optimization with Momentum
Where alumni went36 listed, 30% to industry
Industry 7Academia 16
Most often to
- Microsoft
- NVIDIA
- Anthropic
Also to
- Fudan University
- Columbia University
- ETH Zurich
Apply to UIUCFall 2027
UIUC Siebel Computer Science PhD
- Round
- Single round
- Opens
- —
- GRE
- optional
- English
- TOEFL iBT / IELTS
- Fee
- USD 90
Not yet confirmed for this intake.
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