← Search

Zitong Yang

8 accepted papers

2026

Synthetic Bootstrapped Pretraining

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce Synthetic Bootstrapped Pretraining (SBP), a language model (LM) pretraining procedure that first learns a model of relations between documents from the pretraining dataset and then leverages it to synthesize a vast new corpus for joint training. While the standard pretraining teaches LM…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Towards Execution-Grounded Automated AI Research

ICML 2026poster

Automated AI research holds great potential to accelerate scientific discovery. However, current LLMs often generate plausible-looking but ineffective ideas. Execution grounding may help, but it is unclear whether automated execution is feasible and whether LLMs can learn from the execution feedback…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Synthetic continued pretraining

ICLR 2025oral

Pretraining on large-scale, unstructured internet text enables language models to acquire a significant amount of world knowledge. However, this knowledge acquisition is data-inefficient---to learn a fact, models must be trained on hundreds to thousands of diverse representations of it. This poses a…

2025

s1: Simple test-time scaling

EMNLP 2025

Test-time scaling is a promising new approach to language modeling that uses extra test-time compute to improve performance. Recently, OpenAI’s o1 model showed this capability but did not publicly share its methodology, leading to many replication efforts. We seek the simplest approach to achieve te

2023

ResMem: Learn what you can and memorize the rest

NeurIPS 2023poster

The impressive generalization performance of modern neural networks is attributed in part to their ability to implicitly memorize complex training patterns. Inspired by this, we explore a novel mechanism to improve model generalization via explicit memorization. Specifically, we propose the residual…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2021

Exact Gap between Generalization Error and Uniform Convergence in Random Feature Models

ICML 2021spotlight

Recent work showed that there could be a large gap between the classical uniform convergence bound and the actual test error of zero-training-error predictors (interpolators) such as deep neural networks. To better understand this gap, we study the uniform convergence in the nonlinear random feature…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2020

Rethinking Bias-Variance Trade-off for Generalization of Neural Networks

ICML 2020poster

The classical bias-variance trade-off predicts that bias decreases and variance increase with model complexity, leading to a U-shaped risk curve. Recent work calls this into question for neural networks and other over-parameterized models, for which it is often observed that larger models generalize…