I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Georgia, advised by Dr. Jin Sun and Dr. Ninghao Liu. My research centers on multimodal learning, vision-language models, and model interpretability, with the goal of building multimodal models that are more capable, reliable, and interpretable in real-world scenarios.
Prior to my Ph.D., I received my Master’s degree from the National University of Singapore, where I was advised by Dr. Guillaume Sartoretti and worked on topics at the intersection of robotics and machine learning.
🔥 News
- 2026.05 Our paper RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers was accepted to ICML 2026 🎉
- 2026.02 Our paper Common Inpainted Objects In-N-Out of Context was accepted to CVPR 2026 🎉
- 2025.05 Our paper Concept-Centric Token Interpretation for Vector-Quantized Generative Models was accepted to ICML 2025 🎉
- 2024.11 Received the Distinguished Paper Award at AMIA 2024 🏆
📝 Publications
* denotes equal contribution
Under Review
TRON: Targeted Rule-Verifiable Online Environments for Visual Reasoning RL
Tianze Yang*, Yucheng Shi*, Ruitong Sun, Jingyuan Huang, Ninghao Liu, Jin Sun
Project Page
Under Review
Self-Improving Small Object Grounding in LVLMs
Tianze Yang, Yucheng Shi, Ruitong Sun, Ninghao Liu, Jin Sun
Project Page
ICML 2026
RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers
Ruitong Sun, Tianze Yang, Wei Niu, Jin Sun
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026
CVPR 2026
Common Inpainted Objects In-N-Out of Context
Tianze Yang*, Tyson Jordan*, Ninghao Liu, Jin Sun
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026
Project Page
ICML 2025
Concept-Centric Token Interpretation for Vector-Quantized Generative Models
Tianze Yang*, Yucheng Shi*, Mengnan Du, Xuansheng Wu, Qiaoyu Tan, Jin Sun, Ninghao Liu
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025
BIBM 2025
SearchRAG: Can Search Engines Be Helpful for LLM-based Medical Question Answering?
Yucheng Shi, Tianze Yang, Canyu Chen, Quanzheng Li, Tianming Liu, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu
IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) 2025
AMIA 2024
MKRAG: Medical Knowledge Retrieval Augmented Generation for Medical Question Answering
Yucheng Shi*, Shaochen Xu*, Tianze Yang*, Zhengliang Liu, Tianming Liu, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu
American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium (AMIA) 2024 (Distinguished Paper Award)
ICRA 2024
Alpha: Attention-based long-horizon pathfinding in highly-structured areas
Chengyang He, Tianze Yang, Tanishq Duhan, Yutong Wang, Guillaume Sartoretti
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
MRS 2023
Intent-based deep reinforcement learning for multi-agent informative path planning
Tianze Yang, Yuhong Cao, Guillaume Sartoretti
International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (MRS) 2023
💼 Internships
- 2026 Summer Research Intern · Nokia · Sunnyvale, CA
🎓 Education
- 2023.08 – Present Ph.D. in Computer Science · University of Georgia
- 2021.08 – 2023.06 M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering · National University of Singapore
- 2016.09 – 2020.06 B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering · Shandong University