About

Hi, welcome to my corner of the Internet!

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UT Austin, advised by Prof. Kevin Tian and Prof. Eric Price. Before joining UT Austin, I received my bachelor's degree in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University.

My research focuses on the theoretical foundations of generative models. I am also broadly interested in high-dimensional statistics, learning theory, and trustworthy machine learning. I aim to develop statistically principled methods with provable guarantees for sampling from, reasoning about, and evaluating modern generative systems.

Recently, I am particularly interested in evaluating and auditing large language models and diffusion models, including measuring sample quality and detecting shifts or inconsistencies in model behavior.

Publications

Authors are listed in alphabetical order unless otherwise noted.

2026
Preprint
Model Evaluation

Total Variation Distance Estimation in Autoregressive Models

Eric Price, Kevin Tian, Zhiyang Xun, Yusong Zhu

Workshop Preliminary version presented at the ICML 2026 Hypothesis Testing Workshop.

Preprint
Score-based Sampling

The Tractability Landscape of Sampling with Inexact Scores

Anming Gu, Kevin Tian, Hubert Yang, Yusong Zhu

COLT 2026
Sparse Recovery

Separating Oblivious and Adaptive Models of Variable Selection

Ziyun Chen, Jerry Li, Kevin Tian, Yusong Zhu

2025
COLT 2025
Bayesian Sampling

Spike-and-Slab Posterior Sampling in High Dimensions

Syamantak Kumar, Purnamrita Sarkar, Kevin Tian, Yusong Zhu

2023
NeurIPS 2023
MCMC

Fast Conditional Mixing of MCMC Algorithms for Non-log-concave Distributions

Xiang Cheng, Bohan Wang, Jingzhao Zhang, Yusong Zhu

Teaching

  • Spring 2026 Teaching Assistant, CS 395T: Continuous Algorithms The University of Texas at Austin
  • 2020–2022 Volunteer Mathematics and Programming Tutor Tsinghua University

Professional Service

Conference Reviewer

ICML 2026 (Gold Reviewer), FOCS 2026, and NeurIPS 2026.

Education

Sep. 2024 – Present

The University of Texas at Austin

Ph.D. student in Computer Science

Advisors: Kevin Tian and Eric Price

Sep. 2020 – Jun. 2024

Tsinghua University · School of Software

B.S. in Software Engineering

Sep. 2020 – Jun. 2024

Tsinghua University · Department of Statistics

Minor in Statistics