张洋 ☕️
张洋 Zhang Yang

PhD-Track Student

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Secure Learning Lab

About Me

Aligning today’s highly-capable AI systems with social and intellectual progress. Also does funky stuff on the guitar.

Download CV
Interests
  • Red-teaming
  • Safety Alignment
  • Domain-specific Agents
Education

  • PhD Student

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  • Research Intern

    University of California San Diego

  • Exchange Student

    National University of Singapore

  • BSc Intelligence Science and Technology

    Peking University

Thanks for Scrolling Down!

I am a PhD student starting in 2026 Fall in the Security Learning Lab, led by the fantastic Prof. Bo Li, at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, UIUC. Previously, I was a fortunate first-batch graduate of Peking University’s ‘Zhi Class’ Honors Program. Please see ’experience’ page for details.

My research interests lie in securing, grounding and orchestrating large language models for impactful application. This would include fileds such as safety alignment, interpretability and agent systems. My ultimate goal is to build AI systems that not just ‘automates’, but advance us in high-value domains such as science. Please see ‘writings’ page for what I’ve been tinkering.

Recent News
  • [2026.08.18] I’ve officially started my PhD journey in UIUC under Prof. Bo Li, focusing on AI security. Wish me luck!
  • [2026.05.21] I’ve defended my undergraduate thesis with an A grading; see the script [here].
  • [2026.01.07] I’ve joined ByteDance as an intern, working with the amazing Lark (Feishu) Search/AI team.
  • I’m actively seeking for PhD opportunities starting in 2026 Fall. Feel free to reach out!
  • [2025.12.19] I was awarded the “Qiusuo” Scholarship by School of Electric Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University (10 recipients).
  • [2025.12.04] I was awarded the “Taotian” Scholarship jointly by Alibaba and School of Intelligence Science and Technology of Peking University (4 undergraduate recipients).
  • [2025.12.01] Welcome to my website!
Featured Publications
The Emergence of Abstract Thought in Large Language Models Beyond Any Language
ProgressGym: Alignment with a Millennium of Moral Progress
Blogs & Manuscripts

Things I’ve been tinkering.

Machine Learning Course Project

Complementing OpenEvolve with experience replay to find solution for a problem that’s on par with human-expert SOTA (which no code-generation agent has accomplished before).

Multi-Modal Learning Project

Inference-time scaling for multimodal reasoning, improving accuracy and efficiency under tight compute.

Capstone Project Proposal

Proposal outlining the background, goals, methodology, and expected impact of my capstone project.