About Me

I am a third-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, currently on leave.

My current main interest is AI for scientific discovery / Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) [my research vision]. I believe that once AI can run research end to end on its own, technological progress goes exponential.

As an impact-driven researcher, I aim to build scalable methods that are effective in practice and deliver real-world impact.

If you are interested in collaborating, feel free to email me.

Oral presentations at ICLR 2026, ICML 2025 and ICLR 2025, and at the NonAR-LM@COLM2026 and IAEval@NeurIPS2026 workshops.

Projects

🔥 Open-dCoder: The First Fully Open Diffusion LLM for Code
A 0.5B diffusion coding model with pretraining pipeline, inference code, checkpoints, and evaluation suite.
📝 Notion Blog | 💻 GitHub GitHub stars
Open Source Project

Preprints

Massive Activations in Hybrid Linear Attention Large Language Models: Pre-Attention Spikes and Inter-Spike Plateaus
Zunhai Su, Bohan Sun, Xialie Zhuang, Shuibai Zhang, He Xiao, Jing Xiong, Hengyuan Zhang, Zhongzhu Zhou, Tiantian Zhang, Ngai Wong, Chuan-Wei Kuo
ArXiv

Papers

The Long-Horizon Task Mirage? Diagnosing Where and Why Agentic Systems Break
Xinyu Jessica Wang, Haoyue Bai, Yiyou Sun, Haorui Wang, Shuibai Zhang, Wenjie Hu, Mya Schroder, Bilge Mutlu, Dawn Song, Robert D Nowak
IAEval@NeurIPS2026 Oral Presentation
Off-Manifold Collapse in Guided Protein Language Models
Shuibai Zhang*, Xinchi Liu*, Fred Zhangzhi Peng, Zhihan Yang, Shutong Wu, Yingzi Ma, Jiawei Zhang
AI4DD@NeurIPS2026 equal contribution
Continuous Diffusion Scales Competitively with Discrete Diffusion for Language
Zhihan Yang, Wei Guo, Shuibai Zhang, Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Yongxin Chen, Arash Vahdat, Morteza Mardani, John Thickstun
NeurIPS 2026
NonAR-LM@COLM2026 Oral Presentation
Corrective Diffusion Language Models
Shuibai Zhang, Fred Zhangzhi Peng, Yiheng Zhang, Jin Pan, Grigorios G Chrysos
NeurIPS 2026
Is the Importance Ratio Necessary for Stable Reinforcement Learning in LLMs?
Shuibai Zhang*, Junhyuck Kim*, Gyeongman Kim, Jaewoong Cho
NeurIPS 2026 equal contribution
Expert-Choice Routing Enables Adaptive Computation in Diffusion Language Models
Shuibai Zhang*, Caspian Zhuang*, Chihan Cui*, Zhihan Yang, Fred Zhangzhi Peng, Yanxin Zhang, Haoyue Bai, Zack Jia, Yang Zhou, Guanhua Chen, Ming Liu
COLM 2026 equal contribution
ReJump: A Tree-Jump Representation for Analyzing and Improving LLM Reasoning
Yuchen Zeng*, Shuibai Zhang*, Wonjun Kang*, Shutong Wu, Lynnix Zou, Ying Fan, Heeju Kim, Ziqian Lin, Jungtaek Kim, Hyung Il Koo, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Kangwook Lee
ICML 2026 equal contribution
Planner Aware Path Learning in Diffusion Language Models Training
Fred Zhangzhi Peng, Zachary Bezemek, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Shuibai Zhang, Anru R. Zhang, Michael Bronstein, Avishek Joey Bose, Alexander Tong
ICLR 2026 Oral Presentation
ParallelBench: Understanding the Tradeoffs of Parallel Decoding in Diffusion LLMs
Wonjun Kang, Kevin Galim, Seunghyuk Oh, Minjae Lee, Yuchen Zeng, Shuibai Zhang, Coleman Hooper, Yuezhou Hu, Hyung Il Koo, Nam Ik Cho, Kangwook Lee
ICLR 2026
dVLM-AD: Enhance Diffusion Vision-Language-Model for Driving via Controllable Reasoning
Yingzi Ma, Yulong Cao, Wenhao Ding, Shuibai Zhang, Yan Wang, Boris Ivanovic, Ming Jiang, Marco Pavone, Chaowei Xiao
CVPR 2026 Findings
VersaPRM: Multi-Domain Process Reward Model via Synthetic Reasoning Data
Thomas Zeng, Shuibai Zhang, Shutong Wu, Christian Classen, Daewon Chae, Ethan Ewer, Minjae Lee, Heeju Kim, Wonjun Kang, Jackson Kunde, Ying Fan, Jungtaek Kim, Hyung Il Koo, Kannan Ramchandran, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Kangwook Lee
ICML 2025 Oral Presentation
Dynamic Multimodal Evaluation with Flexible Complexity by Vision-Language Bootstrapping
Yue Yang*, Shuibai Zhang*, Wenqi Shao*, Kaipeng Zhang, Yi Bin, Yu Wang, Ping Luo
ICLR 2025 Oral Presentation equal contribution
Needle In A Multimodal Haystack
Weiyun Wang*, Shuibo Zhang*, Yiming Ren*, Yuchen Duan*, Tiantong Li*, Shuo Liu, Mengkang Hu, Zhe Chen, Kaipeng Zhang, Lewei Lu, Xizhou Zhu, Ping Luo, Yu Qiao, Jifeng Dai, Wenqi Shao, Wenhai Wang
NeurIPS 2024 equal contribution
Supervised Knowledge Makes Large Language Models Better In-Context Learners
Linyi Yang*, Shuibai Zhang*, Zhuohao Yu*, Guangsheng Bao, Yidong Wang, Jindong Wang, Ruochen Xu, Wei Ye, Xing Xie, Weizhu Chen, Yue Zhang
ICLR 2024 equal contribution
GLUE-X: Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Models from an Out-of-distribution Generalization Perspective
Linyi Yang*, Shuibai Zhang*, Libo Qin, Yafu Li, Yidong Wang, Hanmeng Liu, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Yue Zhang
ACL 2023 Findings equal contribution

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant - COMP SCI 220 Data Science Programming I
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Spring 2025, Fall 2025 and Spring 2026
Teaching Assistant - COMP SCI 300 Programming II
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Fall 2024

Services

Reviewer
NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, ECCV