Publications and Preprints

2026

  1. Preprint
    Self-Distilled Reasoner: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Large Language Models
    Siyan Zhao, Zhihui Xie, Mengchen Liu, Jing Huang, Guan Pang, Feiyu Chen, and Aditya Grover
    arXiv, 2026
    arXiv Blog
  2. ICLR 2026
    SPG: Sandwiched Policy Gradient for Masked Diffusion Language Models
    Chenyu Wang, Paria Rashidinejad, DiJia Su, Song Jiang, Sid Wang, Siyan Zhao, Cai Zhou, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Feiyu Chen, Tommi Jaakkola, Yuandong Tian, and Bo Liu
    ICLR, 2026
    Spotlight at the NeurIPS 2025 Efficient Reasoning Workshop
    arXiv Code Website
  3. ICLR 2026
    Inpainting-Guided Policy Optimization for Diffusion Large Language Models
    Siyan Zhao, Mengchen Liu, Jing Huang, Miao Liu, Chenyu Wang, Bo Liu, Yuandong Tian, Guan Pang, Sean Bell, Aditya Grover, and Feiyu Chen
    ICLR, 2026
    Spotlight at the NeurIPS 2025 Efficient Reasoning Workshop
    arXiv Code

2025

  1. NeurIPS 2025
    d1: Scaling Reasoning in Diffusion Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning
    Siyan Zhao*, Devaansh Gupta*, Qinqing Zheng, and Aditya Grover
    NeurIPS, 2025
    Spotlight, 3.2% acceptance rate
    arXiv Code Website
  2. ICLR 2025
    Do LLMs Recognize Your Preferences? Evaluating Personalized Preference Following in LLMs
    Siyan Zhao, Mingyi Hong, Yang Liu, Devamanyu Hazarika, and Kaixiang Lin
    ICLR, 2025
    Oral Presentation, 1.8% acceptance rate
    arXiv Code Website
  3. NeurIPS 2025
    MedMax: Mixed-Modal Instruction Tuning for Training Biomedical Assistants
    Hritik Bansal, Daniel Israel*, Siyan Zhao*, Shufan Li, Tung Nguyen, and Aditya Grover
    NeurIPS, 2025
    arXiv Code
  4. AISTATS 2025
    Prepacking: A Simple Method for Fast Prefilling and Increased Throughput in Large Language Models
    Siyan Zhao*, Daniel Israel*, Guy Van den Broeck, and Aditya Grover
    AISTATS, 2025
    arXiv Code

2024

  1. NeurIPS 2024
    Probing the Decision Boundaries of In-context Learning in Large Language Models
    Siyan Zhao, Tung Nguyen, and Aditya Grover
    NeurIPS, 2024
    Best Paper Runner-Up at the NeurIPS 2024 MINT Workshop
    arXiv Code
  2. ICLR 2024
    Group Preference Optimization: Few-Shot Alignment of Large Language Models
    Siyan Zhao, John Dang, and Aditya Grover
    ICLR, 2024
    arXiv Code Website

2023

  1. NeurIPS 2023
    Decision Stacks: Flexible Reinforcment Learning Via Modular Generative Models
    Siyan Zhao, and Aditya Grover
    NeurIPS, 2023
    arXiv Code Website

2022

  1. ICRA 2022
    Object Insertion Based Data Augmentation for Semantic Segmentation
    Yuan Ren, Siyan Zhao, and Bingbing Liu
    ICRA, 2022
    PDF

2020

  1. Preprint
    One Demonstration Imitation Learning
    Bradly C. Stadie*, Siyan Zhao*, Qiqi Xu, Bonnie Li, and Lunjun Zhang
    preprint, 2020
    PDF