Siyan Zhao

I’m a 4th-year PhD student in Computer Science at UCLA. I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Aditya Grover.

My primary research interest lies in endowing machines with human-like reasoning and efficiency. My recent research focuses on:

• Understanding and scaling (diffusion) LLM reasoning via RL — d1, IGPO, and probing in-context learning.
• Efficient preference alignment & personalization — GPO, PrefEval.
• LLM inference efficiency & modular design for RL — Prepacking, Decision Stacks.

Prior to UCLA, I obtained my bachelor’s degree from the Engineering Science (Machine Intelligence program) at the University of Toronto. Before my PhD, I worked on 3D perception and RL algorithms for autonomous driving agents.