Yanjian Zhang's blog

About

Blog

AI RESEARCH · PERSONAL NOTES

Yanjian Zhang 张言健

Joint Ph.D. candidate · LIPN & LLF

I'm a joint Ph.D. candidate at Université Sorbonne Paris Nord and Université Paris Cité, affiliated with LIPN and LLF. My research focuses on LLM reasoning, world modeling, and research-reproduction agents.

Previously, I received an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Big Data Management and Analytics, with a full Erasmus Mundus scholarship, and my bachelor's degree from the School of Data Science, Fudan University.

Email GitHub Blog
Yanjian Zhang in ParisResearching intelligence,
from language to worlds.

Publications

Papers & thesis
2026

TouchéWorld: Towards Online Unified Camera–Hand Exploration in Generative Worlds

Yanjian Zhang*, Jiaao Yu* (co-first), Haoyang Jiang, Chaofan Ding, Nadi Tomeh

Submitted to CVPR 2027

2026

LEAFLET: Evidence-Grounded Rubric Generation for Scalable Research-Reproduction Agent Evaluation

Yanjian Zhang, Guillaume Wisniewski, Yunfan Shao, Nadi Tomeh

ACL ARR · Under review

2026

Sparsity-Aware Evolution for Model Merging

Yanjian Zhang*, Huan Zhang* (co-first), Guillaume Wisniewski, Nadi Tomeh, Bang Liu

arXiv · ACL ARR, under review

* Equal contribution. Submission and review status are shown for each paper.

Experience

Research & industry

Giant Interactive

Jun–Oct 2026

Research Team Lead Intern · Visual World Models

Built and led a Ph.D. research team working on world models with coordinated camera and gesture control.

Analemma

Jan–Jun 2026

Research Intern · AI for Science

Worked on research-reproduction agent evaluation and agentic reinforcement learning.

Shanghai AI Lab

Apr–Dec 2025

Research Intern · Diffusion Models & Model Merging

Worked on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for diffusion language models and model merging in collaboration with MILA.

Qantev

Sep 2023–Apr 2024

Data Scientist

Developed and deployed document understanding, information extraction, and RAG systems for insurance clients.

Ubisoft Paris Studio

Feb–Aug 2023

Data Scientist Intern

Studied game-data verbalization and tone- and character-conditioned commentary generation.

Shopee

Jul–Sep 2022

Algorithm Engineer Intern

Honors

Recognition

Fudan University Outstanding Graduate

Awarded by Fudan University

Chun-Tsung Fellowship / Scholar

Awarded by Nobel Laureate Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee