Hi, it's Yangtian Zhang

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Hello! I’m Yangtian Zhang, I’m a second-year Ph.D. student at Yale University, coadvised by Prof. Rex Ying and Prof. David van Dijk.

Before joining Yale, I worked under the guidance of Prof. Jian Tang at MILA. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the ACM Honors Class, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I also spent time at Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research Asia, and Microsoft AI4Science.

My research interests lie within the domain of generative modeling (in context of both continuous and discrete data), I’m exploring innovative solutions for real-world applications and scientific problems.


News

Sep 21, 2025 Our work CaDDi has been accepted by NeurIPS 2025! See you in San Diego! :sparkles:
Jun 7, 2025 I will join Google DeepMind as a student researcher in Summer 2025. See you in New York!
May 15, 2025 Our work FlowCF has been accepted by KDD 2025!
Sep 8, 2024 Our new survey on diffusion model in recommendation system :mag: is now available online!
Sep 22, 2023 Our work DiffPack was accepted at NeurIPS 2023! :sparkles:

Selected Publications

  1. caddi_demo.png
    Non-Markovian Discrete Diffusion with Causal Language Models
    Yangtian Zhang*, Sizhuang He*, Daniel Levine, Lawrence Zhao, David Zhang, Syed A Rizvi, Emanuele Zappala, Rex Ying, and 1 more author
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025
  2. flowcf.png
    Flow Matching for Collaborative Filtering
    Chengkai Liu*Yangtian Zhang*, Jianling Wang, Rex Ying, and James Caverlee
    ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2025
  3. calmflow.png
    CaLMFlow: Volterra Flow Matching using Causal Language Models
    Sizhuang He, Daniel Levine, Ivan Vrkic, Marco Francesco Bressana, David Zhang, Syed Asad Rizvi, Yangtian Zhang, Emanuele Zappala, and 1 more author
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.05292, 2024
  4. diffpack_demo.gif
    DiffPack: A Torsional Diffusion Model for Autoregressive Protein Side-Chain Packing
    Yangtian Zhang*, Zuobai Zhang*, Bozitao Zhong, Sanchit Misra, and Jian Tang
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023
  5. e3bind_demo.gif
    E3Bind: An End-to-End Equivariant Network for Protein-Ligand Docking
    Yangtian Zhang*, Huiyu Cai*, Chence Shi, Bozitao Zhong, and Jian Tang
    Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023
  6. torchprotein_logo_full.png
    PEER: A Comprehensive and Multi-task Benchmark for Protein Sequence Understanding
    Minghao Xu, Zuobai Zhang, Jiarui Lu, Zhaocheng Zhu, Yangtian Zhang, Ma Chang, Runcheng Liu, and Jian Tang
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2022
  7. torchdrug_logo_full.png
    TorchDrug: A Powerful and Flexible Machine Learning Platform for Drug Discovery
    Zhaocheng Zhu, Chence Shi, Zuobai Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Minghao Xu, Xinyu Yuan, Yangtian Zhang, Junkun Chen, and 3 more authors
    Preprint, 2022
  8. AutoGAIL.png
    Imitation Learning via Multi-Step Occupancy Measure Matching
    Minghuan Liu, Hangyu Wang, Yangtian Zhang, Minkai Xu, Zhengbang Zhu, and Weinan Zhang
    Preprint, 2022

Projects


Misc

Aside from Computer Science:
  • A Passion for Physics: My interest extends into the realm of physics, a subject that captivated me deeply during high school. I cherish numerous fond memories from competing in national physics competitions during that time.
  • A Musical Endeavor: In the realm of music, I am an enthusiastic amateur, finding joy in playing the guitar, cajon, and djembe. Each instrument brings its own unique melody and rhythm into my life.