I’m Yitong Zhang (张奕彤), a Ph.D. student at College of AI, Tsinghua University. Before that, I received my undergraduate education at School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, where I ranked 2nd in my college in required courses (2/241). I am currently working under the supervision of Prof. Jia Li, and collaborate closely with Zherui.
My research interests center on developing trustworthy AI systems for real-world deployment. More broadly, I am interested in AI-related topics in general. If you are interested in potential collaborations or would like to discuss anything, please feel free to reach out via email. Here is my CV.
🔥 News
- 2026.08: I received the CCF Elite Collegiate Award.
- 2026.05: I was awarded the Tsinghua Doctoral Fellowship for Future Scholars, with only 4 recipients in the College of AI in 2026.
- 2026.04: Two papers have been directly accepted by ISSTA 2026, and one paper is under major revision.
- 2026.04: I was awarded the Beihang Youth May Fourth Medal (only 10 undergraduates university-wide).
- 2026.01: I was honored with the Outstanding Student of Beijing.
- 2025.11: I was awarded the Shen Yuan Medal, the highest student honor at Beihang University. Among all undergraduates at Beihang, only 10 students received this distinction.
- 2025.11: 1 Paper (as first author) accepted by AAAI 2026 (Oral).
- 2025.10: I was admitted to the College of AI, Tsinghua University for Ph.D. studies (comprehensive evaluation score: 95.8).
- 2025.10: I received the National Scholarship (for the 3rd time).
- 2024.11: I received the Xiaomi Scholarship Special Prize.
- 2024.10: My research grant (as Principal Investigator) is approved by Beijing Natural Science Foundation.
📝 Selected Publications
* indicates author with equal contribution and † indicates corresponding author.
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Beyond Autoregression: An Empirical Study of Diffusion Large Language Models for Code Generation
Chengze Li*, Yitong Zhang*, Jia Li†, Liyi Cai, Ge Li
ACM TOSEM
[paper] [code] -
DiffuTester: Accelerating Unit Test Generation for Diffusion LLMs via Mining Structural Pattern
Lekang Yang, Yuetong Liu, Yitong Zhang, Jia Li†
EMNLP MAIN 2026
[paper] [code] -
DiffuCD: Efficient Contrastive Decoding for Diffusion Language Models
Jia Li, Yitong Zhang (Student First Author), Zhi Jin†
Journal of Software -
Improving Sampling for Masked Diffusion Models via Information Gain
Kaisen Yang, Jayden Teoh, Kaicheng Yang, Yitong Zhang, Alex Lamb†
ICML 2026
[paper] [code] -
Visual Adversarial Attack on Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving
Tianyuan Zhang*, Lu Wang*, Xinwei Zhang, Yitong Zhang, Boyi Jia, Siyuan Liang, Shengshan Hu, Qiang Fu, Aishan Liu†, Xianglong Liu
Machine Intelligence Research
[paper] -
CoACT: Action-Preserving Observation Compression for Coding Agents
Haorui Chen, Yuancheng Zhu, Yitong Zhang, Jia Li†
Preprint
[paper] [code] -
Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code
Yitong Zhang*, Shiteng Lu*, Jia Li†
Preprint
[paper] [code] -
Lookahead-then-Verify: Reliable Constrained Decoding for Diffusion LLMs under Context-Free Grammars
Yitong Zhang, Yongmin Li, Yuetong Liu, Jia Li†, Xiaoran Jia, Zherui Li, Ge Li
ISSTA 2026
[paper] [code] -
Environmental Injection Attacks against GUI Agents in Realistic Dynamic Environments
Yitong Zhang, Ximo Li, Liyi Cai, Jia Li†
ISSTA 2026
[paper] [code] -
PackMonitor: Enabling Zero Package Hallucinations Through Decoding-Time Monitoring
Xiting Liu, Yuetong Liu, Yitong Zhang, Jia Li†, Shi-Min Hu†
ISSTA 2026
[paper] [code] -
DAVSP: Safety Alignment for Large Vision-Language Models via Deep Aligned Visual Safety Prompt
Yitong Zhang, Jia Li†, Liyi Cai, Ge Li
AAAI 2026 Oral
[paper] [code] -
To See is Not to Master: Teaching LLMs to Use Private Libraries for Code Generation
Yitong Zhang*, Chengze Li*, Ruize Chen*, Guowei Yang, Xiaoran Jia, Yijie Ren, Jia Li†
Preprint
[paper] [code] -
DiffuGuard: How Intrinsic Safety is Lost and Found in Diffusion Large Language Models
Zherui Li*, Zheng Nie*, Zhenhong Zhou, Yue Liu, Yitong Zhang, Yu Cheng, Qingsong Wen, Kun Wang†, Yufei Guo†, Jiaheng Zhang
ICLR 2026
NeurIPS 2025 Workshop
[paper] [code] -
AI-Driven Self-Evolving Software: A Promising Path Toward Software Automation
Liyi Cai*, Yijie Ren*, Yitong Zhang*, Jia Li†
Preprint
[paper] [code] -
Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks with Stealth Preservation
Xinwei Zhang, Tianyuan Zhang, Yitong Zhang, Shuangcheng Liu†
CVPR 2024 Workshop
[paper] -
Omni-Safety under Cross-Modality Conflict: Vulnerabilities, Dynamics Mechanisms and Efficient Alignment
Kun Wang*, Zherui Li*, Zhenhong Zhou, Yitong Zhang, Yan Mi, Kun Yang, Yiming Zhang, Junhao Dong, Zhongxiang Sun, Qiankun Li, Yang Liu
Preprint
[paper] [code] -
Benchmarking the Robustness of Autonomous Driving to Environmental Illusions: A Lane Perception Perspective
Tianyuan Zhang, Xianglong Liu†, Aishan Liu, Lu Wang, Yitong Zhang, Peng Yue, Mingchuan Zhang, Siyuan Liang, Dacheng Tao
TPAMI
[paper] [code] -
What Papers Don’t Tell You: Recovering Tacit Knowledge for Automated Paper Reproduction
Lehui Li*, Ruining Wang*, Haochen Song, Yaoxin Mao, Tong Zhang, Yuyao Wang, Jiayi Fan, Yitong Zhang, Jieping Ye, Chengqi Zhang, Yongshun Gong†
Preprint
[paper]
✨ Grants
- Large Model Driven End-to-End Autonomous Driving Model Adversarial Attacks
Principal Investigator, Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. QY24136)
2024.10 - 2026.09
🎖 Honors and Awards
- Tsinghua Doctoral Fellowship for Future Scholars, 2026
- Shen Yuan Medal (top 0.1%), the highest honor scholarship of Beihang University, 2025
- Beihang Youth May Fourth Medal, the highest honor for youth members at Beihang University, 2026
- CCF Elite Collegiate Award, 2026
- Xiaomi Scholarship Special Prize (only 5 undergraduates university-wide), 2024
- China National Scholarship (3rd time), 2025
- China National Scholarship (2nd time), 2024
- China National Scholarship, 2023
- First prize, Chinese Mathematics Competitions for Undergraduates (Beijing Division), 2023
- Outstanding Student of Beijing, 2026
- Outstanding Student of Shandong, 2022
📖 Education
- 2026.09 - 2031.06 (expected), Ph.D. Student, College of AI, Tsinghua University
- 2022.09 - 2026.06, Undergraduate Student, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University
- 2019.09 - 2022.06, High School Student, Shandong Taian No.1 Senior High School
💼 Internships
📚 Services
- Reviewer: AAAI 2026
👩🏻🏫 Teaching
- Teaching Assistant, Discrete Mathematics, Beihang University, Spring 2025
- Teaching Assistant, Computer Organization, Beihang University, Fall 2024
- Senior Teaching Assistant, Data Structures and Programming, Beihang University, Spring 2024
🌿 Personality
In my spare time, I take food very seriously—my very high Engel’s coefficient says it all. When I am not eating, I am usually listening to folk or rock music, or walking aimlessly around Beijing with friends.
🔗 Links
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Advisors: Jia Li (THU), Xingwei Lin (Ant Group), Aishan Liu (BUAA), Fang Liu (BUAA)
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Co-authors: Zherui Li (NTU), Tianyuan Zhang (BUAA), Lehui Li (THU)
In the age of artificial intelligence, I strive to advance technology for the greater good, for safe and controllable progress, and for the benefit of the people (推动科技向上向善、安全可控、造福人民).