Andrew Zhang

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at UCLA, advised by Aditya Grover. Previously, I worked on accelerating inference on AWS Trainium devices. I did a BS/MS at Virginia Tech under Chris Thomas. I am interested in multi-token generation (discrete diffusion and speculative decoding) and hardware-aware algorithms.

You can find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, X, and Google Scholar.

latest posts

Dec 04, 2025	Published 4 Papers!
Oct 21, 2025	Discrete Diffusion for Text Infilling

selected publications

Flexible-length text infilling for discrete diffusion models

Andrew Zhang, Anushka Sivakumar, Chia-Wei Tang, and Chris Thomas

In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{zhang2025flexible,
  title = {Flexible-length text infilling for discrete diffusion models},
  author = {Zhang, Andrew and Sivakumar, Anushka and Tang, Chia-Wei and Thomas, Chris},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
  year = {2025},
}

SteerVLM: Robust Model Control through Lightweight Activation Steering for Vision Language Models

Anushka Sivakumar, Andrew Zhang, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim, and Chris Thomas

In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP Findings), 2025

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{sivakumar2025steervlm,
  title = {SteerVLM: Robust Model Control through Lightweight Activation Steering for Vision Language Models},
  author = {Sivakumar, Anushka and Zhang, Andrew and Hakim, Zaber Ibn Abdul and Thomas, Chris},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP Findings)},
  year = {2025},
}

Zero-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification Using Large Vision-Language Models

Md. Atabuzzaman, Andrew Zhang, and Chris Thomas

In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP Findings), 2025

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{atabuzzaman2025zeroshot,
  title = {Zero-Shot Fine-Grained Image Classification Using Large Vision-Language Models},
  author = {Atabuzzaman, Md. and Zhang, Andrew and Thomas, Chris},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP Findings)},
  year = {2025},
}

Maximal Matching Matters: Preventing Representation Collapse for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval

Hani Alomari, Anushka Sivakumar, Andrew Zhang, and Chris Thomas

In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025

arXiv Bib

@inproceedings{alomari2025maximal,
  title = {Maximal Matching Matters: Preventing Representation Collapse for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval},
  author = {Alomari, Hani and Sivakumar, Anushka and Zhang, Andrew and Thomas, Chris},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)},
  year = {2025},
}