Yifan Sun

Yifan Sun

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I earned my dual master degree from Tsinghua University and Columbia University, and my bachelor from Fudan University.

I’m always interested in exploring new and exciting machine learning topics. I value research that is, at the very least, empirically useful; ideally, grounded in theory; and, at best, elegant.

I’ve previously worked on Data-centric ML and Trustworthy ML, with a particular focus on Large Language Models. My most recent research interests include:

  • RL Fine-tuning for LLMs
  • LLM Reasoning
  • LLM Evaluation

🚀 I am currently actively seeking a Research Scientist Internship for Summer 2026. If you think there might be a good fit, feel free to reach out!

📝 Preprints and Publications

Preprints and Workshop Papers:

  • SVIP: Towards Verifiable Inference of Open-Source Large Language Models, Yifan Sun$^{\dagger}$, Yuhang Li$^{\dagger}$, Yue Zhang, Yuchen Jin, Huan Zhang, Socially Responsible and Trustworthy Foundation Models Workshop at NeurIPS 2025 (Oral Presentation)
  • When Reasoning Meets Its Laws, Junyu Zhang$^{\dagger}$, Yifan Sun$^{\dagger}$, Tianang Leng$^{\dagger}$, Jingyan Shen$^{\dagger}$, Ziyin Liu, Paul Pu Liang, Huan Zhang, Efficient Reasoning Workshop at NeurIPS 2025 (Oral Presentation; Best Paper Nomination)
  • Learning a Zeroth-Order Optimizer for Fine-Tuning LLMs, Kairun Zhang$^{\dagger}$, Haoyu Li$^{\dagger}$, Yanjun Zhao$^{\dagger}$, Yifan Sun, Huan Zhang
  • Alignment from Ranking and Rating Information, Luca Viano, Ruida Zhou, Yifan Sun, Mahdi Namazifar, Volkan Cevher, Shoham Sabach, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh
  • Influence-Preserving Proxies for Gradient-Based Data Selection in LLM Fine-Tuning, Sirui Chen, Yunzhe Qi, Mengting Ai, Yifan Sun, Ruizhong Qiu, Jiaru Zou, Jingrui He

Selected Publications:

$^{\dagger}$ indicates these authors contributed equally to this work. See my Google Scholar for earlier publications.

🥇 Honors and Awards

  • Outstanding Graduate of Beijing, Beijing Municipal Education Commission, 2024
  • Benjamin Miller Memorial Fellowship, Columbia University, 2023
  • National Scholarship for Graduates, Ministry of Education of China, 2022
  • Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai, Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, 2021
  • Excellent Undergraduate Thesis Award, Fudan University, 2021
  • National Scholarship for Undergraduates, Ministry of Education of China, 2018, 2019, 2020

🧑‍⚖️ Academic Service

  • Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, EMNLP

🏢 Industry Experience

  • Applied Scientist Intern, AGI Foundations, Amazon, May 2025 – Aug 2025
    • Conducted research on LLM post-training