About me

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at National University of Singapore advised by Prof. Kenji Kawaguchi. I also closely work with Prof. Michael Qizhe Shieh and Prof. Wenxuan Zhang. I completed my undergraduate at Shanghai Jiaotong University under Prof. Haiming Jin’s advisor.

My research is primarily centered around exploring Efficiency, Multilingual, Alignment, and Reasoning within the context of Large Language Models.

I will be joining Salesforce as a Research Scientist in Dr. Shafiq Joty’s team this coming August, based in Palo Alto.

Open Source Project

• Babel - Open Multilingual Large Language Models Serving Over 90% of Global Speakers
  Yiran Zhao, Chaoqun Liu, Yue Deng, Jiahao Ying, Mahani Aljunied, Zhaodonghui Li, Lidong Bing, Hou Pong Chan, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Wenxuan Zhang.
  [Website] [Model] [Technical Report] [Github]

• SeaLLMs 3: Open Foundation and Chat Multilingual Large Language Models for Southeast Asian Languages
  Wenxuan Zhang*, Hou Pong Chan*, Yiran Zhao*, Mahani Aljunied*, Jianyu Wang*, Chaoqun Liu, Yue Deng, Zhiqiang Hu, Weiwen Xu, Yew Ken Chia, Xin Li, Lidong Bing
  Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL (NAACL) 2025 System Demostration.
  [Website] [Model] [DEMO] [Github] [Technical Report]

Selected Publications

• Pruning General Large Language Models into Customized Expert Models
  Yiran Zhao, Guizhen Chen, Kenji Kawaguchi, Lidong Bing, Wenxuan Zhang.
  Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Findings 2025.
  [paper] [code]

• Unnatural Languages Are Not Bugs but Features for LLMs
  Keyu Duan*, Yiran Zhao*, Zhili Feng, Jinjie Ni, Tianyu Pang, Qian Liu, Tianle Cai, Longxu Dou, Kenji Kawaguchi, Anirudh Goyal, J Zico Kolter, Michael Qizhe Shieh.
  International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025.
  [paper] [code]

• Identifying and Tuning Safety Neurons in Large Language Models
  Yiran Zhao, Wenxuan Zhang, Yuxi Xie, Anirudh Goyal, Kenji Kawaguchi, Michael Qizhe Shieh.
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025.
  [paper]

• Investigating Pattern Neurons in Urban Time Series Forecasting
  Chengxin Wang, Yiran Zhao, Shaofeng Cai, Gary Tan.
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025.
  [paper]

• AdaMergeX: Cross-Lingual Transfer with Large Language Models via Adaptive Adapter Merging
  Yiran Zhao, Wenxuan Zhang, Huiming Wang, Kenji Kawaguchi, Lidong Bing
  Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL (NAACL) Main 2025.
  [paper]

• Is Translation All You Need? A Study on Solving Multilingual Tasks with Large Language Models
  Chaoqun Liu, Wenxuan Zhang, Yiran Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu, Lidong Bing
  Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL (NAACL) Main 2025.
  Oral
  [paper]

• How do Large Language Models Handle Multilingualism?
  Yiran Zhao, Wenxuan Zhang, Guizhen Chen, Kenji Kawaguchi, Lidong Bing.
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024.
  [paper] [code]

• Accelerating Greedy Coordinate Gradient and General Prompt Optimization via Probe Sampling
  Yiran Zhao, Wenyue Zheng, Tianle Cai, Xuan Long Do, Kenji Kawaguchi, Anirudh Goyal, Michael Qizhe Shieh.
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024.
  [paper] [code]

• Reasoning Robustness of LLMs to Adversarial Typographical Errors
  Esther Gan*, Yiran Zhao*, Liying Cheng, Yancan Mao, Anirudh Goyal, Kenji Kawaguchi, Min-Yen Kan, Michael Qizhe Shieh.
  Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) Main 2024.
  [paper] [website]

• Prompt Optimization via Adversarial In-Context Learning
  Xuan Long Do*, Yiran Zhao*, Hannah Brown*, Yuxi Xie, James Xu Zhao, Nancy F. Chen, Michael Shieh, Junxian He.
  Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Main 2024.
  Oral
  [paper] [code]

• Felm: Benchmarking Factuality Evaluation of Large Language Models
  Shiqi Chen, Yiran Zhao, Jinghan Zhang, I-Chun Chern, Siyang Gao, Pengfei Liu, Junxian He.
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Datasets and Benchmarks track 2023.
  [paper] [code]

• Self-Evaluation Guided Beam Search for Reasoning
  Yuxi Xie, Kenji Kawaguchi, Yiran Zhao, James Xu Zhao, Min-Yen Kan, Junxian He, Michael Shieh.
  Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023.
  [paper] [code]

• Joint Order Dispatch and Charging for Electric Self-Driving Taxi Systems
  Guiyun Fan, Haiming Jin, Yiran Zhao, Yiwen Song, Xiaoying Gan, Jiaxin Ding, Lu Su, Xinbing Wang.
  IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) 2022.
  [paper]

• Joint Order Dispatch and Repositioning for Urban Vehicle Sharing Systems via Robust Optimization
  Yiran Zhao, Guiyun Fan, Haiming Jin, Wenze Ma, Baoxiang He, Xinbing Wang.
  IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2021.
  [paper]

• Towards Fine-Grained Spatio-Temporal Coverage for Vehicular Urban Sensing Systems
  Guiyun Fan, Yiran Zhao, Zilang Guo, Haiming Jin, Xiaoying Gan, Xinbing Wang.
  IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) 2021.
  [paper]

​

Experiences

• Alibaba Damo Academy, Aug. 2023 - Feb. 2025, Research Intern at Language Technology Lab, working with Dr. Wenxuan Zhang.
• Salesforce Singapore, Mar. 2025 - Now, Research Intern, working with Dr. Yuhui Xu Dr. Junnan Li.

Professional Services

• Programme Committee Member or Reviewer: NeurIPS 2024, ARR 2024 April, June, COLM 2024, ICLR 2024
• Subreviewer or External Reviewer: AAAI 2024