I am a third-year Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland advised by Prof. Tianyi Zhou. My research focuses on pioneering efficient machine learning methods, encompassing computer vision, natural language processing, and multi-modality. I am particularly passionate about developing adaptive and personalized machine learning models. Before pursuing my Ph.D., I earned my M.S. and B.Eng in Computer Science from ShanghaiTech University, where I delved into research areas such as mixture of experts, domain generalization, and ensemble learning.
🔥 News
- 2026.07: 🎉🎉 One paper has been accepted to the COLM 2026.
- 2026.05: 🎉🎉 One first-author paper was accepted to ICML 2025 as an Oral (0.7%).
- 2026.01: 🎉🎉 Two papers have been accepted by ICLR 2026, including one first-author paper.
- 2025.07: 🎉🎉 One paper has been accepted to the COLM 2025.
- 2025.05: 🎉🎉 One paper has been accepted to the ICML 2025.
- 2025.02: New on arXiv: “R2-T2: Re-Routing in Test-Time for Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts” is now available on arXiv.
- 2025.01: 🎉🎉 One first-author paper has been accepted to the NAACL 2025 Main Conference.
- 2025.01: 🎉🎉 Two first-author papers have been accepted by ICLR 2025, including one Oral (1.8%).
- 2024.10: New on arXiv: “Your Mixture-of-Experts LLM Is Secretly an Embedding Model For Free” is now available on arXiv.
- 2024.03: New on arXiv: “Many-Objective Multi-Solution Transport” is now available on arXiv.
- 2023.08: Entering University of Maryland (UMD) as a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science.
📝 Publications
2026
- Skip a Layer or Loop It? Learning Program-of-Layers in LLMs, Z. Li, Y. Li, T. Zhou, ICML 2026 Oral (0.7%)
- Routing Entropy: A Hidden Self-Verifier for Free in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs, Z. Li, Z. Li, T. Zhou, COLM 2026
- Grokking in LLM Pretraining? Monitor Memorization-to-Generalization without Test, Z. Li, C. Fan, T. Zhou, ICLR 2026
- Routing Manifold Alignment Improves Generalization of Mixture-of-Experts LLMs, Z. Li, Z. Li, T. Zhou, ICLR 2026
2025
- Your Mixture-of-Experts LLM Is Secretly an Embedding Model For Free, Z. Li, T. Zhou, ICLR 2025 Oral (1.8%)
- R2-T2: Re-Routing in Test-Time for Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts, Z. Li, Z. Li, T. Zhou, ICML 2025
- C3PO: Critical-Layer, Core-Expert, Collaborative Pathway Optimization for Test-Time Expert Re-Mixing, Z. Li, Z. Li, T. Zhou, COLM 2025
- Sparser Mixture-of-Adapters with Cross-Layer Generalization, Z. Li, T. Zhou, NAACL 2025
- Many-Objective Multi-Solution Transport, Z. Li, T. Li, V. Smith, J. Bilmes, T. Zhou, ICLR 2025
2023
- SIMPLE: Specialized Model-Sample Matching for Domain Generalization, Z. Li, K. Ren, X. Jiang, Y. Shen, H. Zhang, D. Li, ICLR 2023
- Towards Inference Efficient Deep Ensemble Learning, Z. Li, K. Ren, Y. Yang, X. Jiang, Y. Yang, D. Li, AAAI 2023
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2023,2024: Dean’s Fellowship, University of Maryland.
- 2022: Award of Excellence for Stars of Tomorrow Internship Program, Microsoft Research Asia.
📖 Educations
- 2023 - Present, Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Maryland.
- 2019 - 2022, M.S. in Computer Science, ShanghaiTech University.
- 2015 - 2019, B.Eng in Computer Science, ShanghaiTech University.
- 2015 - 2019, Minor in Finance, ShanghaiTech University.
💻 Internships
- 2025.05 - 2025.08, Research Intern, Snowflake, Bellevue, WA.
- 2022.06 - 2022.12, Research Assistant, AI/ML group, Microsoft Research Asia, Shanghai, China.
- 2021.06 - 2022.03, Research Intern, AI/ML group, Microsoft Research Asia, Shanghai, China.
🐱 Services
- Reviewer: CIKM 2023, NeurIPS 2025, ICLR 2026
- Program Committee: AAAI 2026