Matthew Yang

Welcome, welcome! I've just graduated as a Master's student from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University working with Prof. Aviral Kumar. I'm interested in building systems that actively seek information and continually learn.

Previously, I studied Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Waterloo. I have been extremely lucky to have worked with Prof. Gautam Kamath, Florian Kerschbaum, Yaoliang Yu, Jimmy Lin.

You can reach me at m[lastname]4@cs.cmu.edu.

CV / Google Scholar / Github / LinkedIn / X

News

🎉 Jan 26, 2026: InT and e3 are accepted to ICLR 2026!

Research

(* denotes equal contribution)

Reinforcement Learning on LLMs

InT: Self-Proposed Interventions Enable Credit Assignment in LLM Reasoning
Matthew Y. R. Yang, Hao Bai, Ian Wu, Gene Yang, Amrith Setlur, Aviral Kumar
ICLR 2026
paper / code / website

e3: Learning to Explore Enables Extrapolation of Test-Time Compute for LLMs
Amrith Setlur*, Matthew Y. R. Yang*, Charlie Snell, Jeremy Greer, Ian Wu, Virginia Smith, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar
ICLR 2026 / EXAIT Workshop at ICML 2025 (Best Paper)
paper / code / website

Optimizing Test-Time Compute via Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
Yuxiao Qu*, Matthew Y. R. Yang*, Amrith Setlur, Lewis Tunstall, Edward Emanuel Beeching, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Aviral Kumar
ICML 2025 / FM‑Wild Workshop at ICLR 2025 (Oral)
paper / code / website

Data Poisoning

Disguised Copyright Infringement of Latent Diffusion Models
Yiwei Lu*, Matthew Y. R. Yang*, Zuoqiu Liu*, Gautam Kamath, Yaoliang Yu
ICML 2024
paper / code

Indiscriminate Data Poisoning Attacks on Pre-trained Feature Extractors
Yiwei Lu, Matthew Y. R. Yang, Gautam Kamath, Yaoliang Yu
SaTML 2024
paper / code

Not All Samples Are Equal: Quantifying Instance-level Difficulty in Targeted Data Poisoning
William Xu, Yiwei Lu, Yihan Wang, Matthew Y. R. Yang, Gautam Kamath, Yaoliang Yu
Reliable ML Workshop at NeurIPS 2025
paper

Information Retrieval & Differential Privacy

“Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors
Zhiying Jiang, Matthew Yang, Mikhail Tsirlin, Raphael Tang, Yiqin Dai, Jimmy Lin
ACL 2023
paper / code

Integration of text and geospatial search for hydrographic datasets using the lucene search library
Matthew Y. R. Yang, Siwen Yang, Jimmy Lin
JCDL 2022
paper / code

Credits to Jon Barron for the website design.