Hi, I’m Tianyu. I am an incoming Ph.D. student at Dartmouth College. I have the great honor of being advised by Prof. Yaoqing Yang.

I am passionate about model diagnostics and mechanistic interpretability . My current research is focused on

  • understanding the mechanisms, dynamics and generalization of LLMs from the perspective of random matrix theory, high-dimensional statistics and loss landscape;
  • leveraging model/data diagnostics and interpretability insights to improve the transparency, robustness and efficiency of (scientific) machine learning.

📖 Educations

  • 2025.09 - present, Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College.
  • 2022.09 - 2025.06, M.S. in Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, Nanjing University.
  • 2018.09 - 2022.06, B.S. in Statistics, Kuang Yaming Honors School, Nanjing University.

🔥 News

  • 2025.05: 🎉🎉 Excited to share that our work “LIFT the Veil for the Truth: Principal Weights Emerge after Rank Reduction for Reasoning-Focused Supervised Fine-Tuning” is accepted by ICML 2025 as Poster!
  • 2024.10:  😁 Completing a wonderful three-month visiting at Dartmouth College.
  • 2024.09:  🎉🎉 Excited to share that our work “Model Balancing Helps Low-data Training and Fine-tuning” is accepted by EMNLP 2024 as Oral Presentation!
  • 2023.09:  🎉🎉 Excited to share that our work “Temperature Balancing, Layer-wise Weight Analysis, and Neural Network Training” is accepted by NeurIPS 2023 as Spotlight!

📝 Publications

(# denotes equal contribution)

ICML 2025
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LIFT the Veil for the Truth: Principal Weights Emerge after Rank Reduction for Reasoning-Focused Supervised Fine-Tuning

Zihang Liu, Tianyu Pang, Oleg Balabanov, Chaoqun Yang, Tianjin Huang, Lu Yin, Yaoqing Yang, Shiwei Liu

Code|Paper

ICML 2025

EMNLP 2024
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Model Balancing Helps Low-data Training and Fine-tuning

Zihang Liu#, Yuanzhe Hu#, Tianyu Pang, Yefan Zhou, Pu Ren, Yaoqing Yang

Code|Paper|Video

EMNLP 2024 Oral

NeurIPS 2023
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Temperature Balancing, Layer-wise Weight Analysis, and Neural Network Training

Yefan Zhou#, Tianyu Pang#, Keqin Liu, Charles H. Martin, Michael Mahoney, Yaoqing Yang

Code|Paper|Video

NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight

Preprint
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Crafting Heavy-Tails in Weight Matrix Spectrum without Gradient Noise

Vignesh Kothapalli, Tianyu Pang, Shenyang Deng, Zongmin Liu, Yaoqing Yang

Code|Paper

In submisson, 2025

Preprint
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Why LLM Safety Guardrails Collapse After Fine-tuning: A Similarity Analysis Between Alignment and Fine-tuning Datasets

Lei Hsiung, Tianyu Pang, Yung-Chen Tang, Linyue Song, Tsung-Yi Ho, Pin-yu Chen , Yaoqing Yang

In submisson, 2025