✦ About Me

I'm a junior year undergraduate in Computer Engineering, currently pursuing a dual degree from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Zhejiang University.

My research interest lies in building autonomous agents that interact with digital environments. I am particularly excited about:

  • Computer-use agents and GUI grounding — enabling models to perceive screens, reason over UI elements, and execute actions in real-world software environments.
  • Efficient inference for language models — accelerating generation through techniques such as speculative decoding and adaptive computation, with a current focus on discrete diffusion language models.
Links:
📄 Curriculum Vitae  |  📝 UIUC Transcript
I am passionate about learning and sharing knowledge. Feel free to explore my Notepage where I document my learning journey!

✦ News

  • Feb 2026 🔬 Joined Prof. Fan Lai's group at UIUC, working on efficient inference for discrete diffusion language models.
  • Oct 2025 🎉 Awarded the National Scholarship for the academic year 2024-2025!
  • Apr 2025 📝 Completed my first full research cycle with a submission to KDD 2025 — from literature review, experiments, paper writing to rebuttal. A valuable learning experience!
  • Oct 2024 🎉 Awarded the National Scholarship for the academic year 2023-2024!
  • Jun 2024 Joined AI-Net Lab for summer research focused on building Graph Foundation Model.

✦ Publications

Can Inherent Graph Structure Enhance In-Context Learning?
Yifei Sun, Siyuan Gong, Yuxiang Wan, Zaoshi Wang, Haoyang Zhong, Chunping Wang, Lei CHEN, Yang Yang
Preprint, 2025
We propose ContextG, the first framework to introduce graph structures into ICL. By modeling structural relationships among examples and test queries, ContextG enhances LLM reasoning while improving efficiency.

✦ Experience

Feb 2026 – Present Research

UIUC

Undergraduate Researcher, advised by Prof. Fan Lai

Investigating efficient inference for discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs), where inter-step decoding (ISD) pipelines denoising but suffers from a horizon problem due to its flat propose layout. Proposed Tree-Structured ISD with entropy-guided branching to improve tokens-per-forward-pass, and Content-Adaptive Stride that dynamically adjusts propose window width based on local token difficulty. Literature survey and proposal completed; implementation in progress.

Jun 2024 – Apr 2025 Research

AI-Net Lab, Zhejiang University

Undergraduate Researcher, advised by Prof. Yang Yang

Aimed to improve in-context learning by introducing structural relationships among demonstration candidates and the test query. Proposed ContextG: builds a learnable graph over retrieved examples and the query, uses PageRank-based filtering to select structurally important demonstrations, and encodes them at node/path/subgraph levels to capture multi-hop dependencies. Outperformed SOTA by 2.74% (avg.) on four benchmarks (SST-5, HellaSwag, MRPC, MNLI); best average performance in cross-task transfer. Paper under review.

Spring 2025 Teaching

ZJUI

Teaching Assistant for ECE 220: Computer Systems & Programming with Prof. Bhowmik

Supported weekly labs and office hours and helped students prepare for and debug machine problems (MPs). Designed exam questions and produced recorded pre-exam review sessions based on sample problems. Improved course infrastructure by refactoring the UIUC autograder to increase grading efficiency and reduce student-facing errors. Provided continuous academic support through in-person sessions and online platforms.

Fall 2024 Teaching

ZJUI

Teaching Assistant for MATH 257: Linear Algebra with Prof. Xiangming Meng

Facilitated weekly discussion sessions, reviewing core theoretical concepts and guiding students through structured problem solving. Provided in-person academic mentoring to clarify abstract concepts, support homework, and help students develop effective study strategies. Proactively organized review sessions and shared comprehensive course notes synthesizing lecture slides and textbook materials.

✦ Selected Honors & Awards

  • 2024, 2025

    Dean's List

    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • 2025

    First Prize Scholarship for Academic Excellence

    Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Institute

  • 2024, 2025

    National Scholarship

    Ministry of Education, China

  • 2024, 2025

    First Prize Scholarship

    Zhejiang University

  • 2021, 2022

    First Prize of CSMO (China Southeast Mathematical Olympiad)

    Chinese Mathematical Society

✦ Projects

Yuxiang's Notepage

A comprehensive notebook documenting my learning journey, valuable resources, and study notes.

Documentation Knowledge Base
Visit Project

More Coming Soon...

Exciting projects are in development. Stay tuned for updates!

✦ Education

Sep 2023 - Present

Zhejiang University - UIUC Institute (ZJUI)

Bachelor of Engineering

Major in Computer Engineering. Focusing on computer science fundamentals, algorithms, and machine learning.

✦ Life

Beyond academics, I enjoy exploring the world and experiencing different cultures. Here are some moments from my life journey.

Photography & Travel

I love capturing beautiful moments during my travels. Some of my favorite destinations include Boston, Chicago, and New York.

Photography & Travel Photography & Travel Photography & Travel Photography & Travel

Sports & Fitness

I enjoy playing sports and staying active. Recently, I've been exploring tennis, gym workouts, and rowing — always eager to try new sports!

Sports & Fitness Sports & Fitness

Cultural Exchange

Served as team leader in the 2025 Zhejiang-Hong Kong-Macao College Exchange Program. Through this experience, I connected with students from universities across the three regions, gained broader perspectives on diverse cultures and academic life, and made lasting friendships.

Cultural Exchange Cultural Exchange

✦ Notepage

Yuxiang's Learning Notes

Welcome to explore my notebook page, which documents my harvest during learning and restores some valuable resources.

Visit Notepage