Yiyuan Luo骆艺元

yluo124 [at] ucsc [dot] edu

I am a third-year Ph.D. student at 🍌UC Santa Cruz, advised by Prof. Vaggos Chatziafratis.

✨ Research

I'm interested in representations in foundation models: where a model's abilities come from, how they are encoded, and when one model can borrow them from another instead of learning them from scratch. Many of my ideas start from questioning contrastive learning, the approach I first worked on.

I'm always happy to find collaborators. Feel free to reach out if these questions interest you too! :)

🔥 News

04/2026: One paper accepted by ICML 2026 as a spotlight.
02/2026: One paper accepted by STOC 2026.
09/2025: My first paper got accepted in NeurIPS 2025. See you in San Diego!