I am a Senior Researcher in the Machine Learning Foundations group at Microsoft Research Redmond, working closely with Sébastien Bubeck and Ronen Eldan.
I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2021 from Princeton University where I was privileged to be advised by Sanjeev Arora. For my last year at Princeton, I received the Wallace Memorial Fellowship in Engineering, one of the highest honors awarded to Ph.D. students. Prior to Princeton, I received one Bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and another one from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I was advised by Honglak Lee.
My research concentrates on Theoretical Machine Learning. I am broadly interested in theory and empirics for machine learning, focusing on understanding the intrinsic mechanism of deep learning from a theoretical perspective.
I am a proud dad of a 1-year-old ultra-cute Mame Shiba Inu named Lambo.
He goes by Bobo or 啵啵, at his insistence.

Research Works
author lists are alphabetical, unless labeled by '#'
Sanjeev Arora, Yi Zhang
(#)Yi Zhang, Arushi Gupta, Nikunj Saunshi, Sanjeev Arora
ICLR 2022
Spotlight
(#) Zhiyuan Li, Yi Zhang, Sanjeev Arora
ICLR 2021
(#) Yi Zhang*, Orestis Plevrakis*, Simon S. Du, Xingguo Li, Zhao Song, and Sanjeev Arora
NeurIPS 2020
Udaya Ghai, Holden Lee, Karan Singh, Cyril Zhang, and Yi Zhang
COLT 2020
(#) Nikunj Saunshi, Yi Zhang, Mikhail Kohdak, and Sanjeev Arora
ICML 2020
Mark Braverman, Xinyi Chen, Sham M. Kakade, Karthik Narasimhan, Cyril Zhang, and Yi Zhang
ICML 2020
Naman Agarwal, Xinyi Chen, Elad Hazan, Cyril Zhang, and Yi Zhang
ICLR 2020
(#) Rohith Kuditipudi, Xiang Wang, Holden Lee, Yi Zhang , Zhiyuan Li, Wei Hu, Sanjeev Arora, and Rong Ge
NeurIPS 2019
Naman Agarwal, Brian Bullins, Xinyi Chen, Elad Hazan, Karan Singh, Cyril Zhang and Yi Zhang
ICML 2019
Elad Hazan, Holden Lee, Karan Singh, Cyril Zhang, and Yi Zhang
NeurIPS 2018
Oral Presentation
Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge, Behnam Neyshabur, and Yi Zhang
ICML 2018
Sanjeev Arora, Elad Hazan, Holden Lee, Karan Singh, Cyril Zhang, and Yi Zhang
ICLR 2018 Workshop
Sanjeev Arora, Andrej Risteski, and Yi Zhang
ICLR 2018
Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge, Yingyu Liang, Tengyu Ma, and Yi Zhang
ICML 2017
(#) Anna Gilbert, Yi Zhang, Kibok Lee, Yuting Zhang, and Honglak Lee
IJCAI 2017
(#) Tai Cheng, Xiao Tong, Yi Zhang, Xiaogang Wang, and Weinan E
ICLR 2016
(#) Scott Reed, Yi Zhang, Yuting Zhang, Honglak Lee
NIPS 2015
Oral Presentation
Misc.
Blog posts featuring my works
Teaching
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Teaching Assistant for COS 324 Intro to Machine Learning, Fall 2018.
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Teaching Assistant for COS 445 Economics and Computation, Spring 2019