Tianyu Zhang 张天宇

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advised by Prof. Yupeng Zhang. I am interested in AI safety and cryptography.

tianyuz@illinois.edu · Google Scholar

Tianyu Zhang, Ph.D. student in computer science at UIUC

Education

2025–Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Yupeng Zhang
2021–2025
B.S. in Computer Science (John Hopcroft Class), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, advised by Prof. Yu Yu

Experience

May–Aug 2026
Research Intern, Cloudflare Research, working on anonymous credentials

Publications

AI Safety

NeurIPS 2026
E&D Track, Oral
🤐 “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act?
Xun Liu†, Yi Evie Zhang†, Vira Kasprova*, Parisa Rabbani*, Pardis Sadat Zahraei*, Tianyu Zhang*, Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny, Varun Chandrasekaran
paper · project · code · data

Cryptography

IEEE S&P 2027
💍 “God made the integers; all else is the work of man.”
Nenya: Efficient zkSNARK for Integer Rings Z/2kZ via Reverse Multiplication-Friendly Embeddings
Tianyu Zhang, Nikita Borisov, Yupeng Zhang
EUROCRYPT 2026
⛵ “Plank by plank, still the ship of Theseus.”
Dynark: Making Groth16 Dynamic
Tianyu Zhang, Yupeng Ouyang, Yupeng Zhang
paper
IEEE S&P 2025
⚖️ “Justice is blind.”
FairZK: A Scalable System to Prove Machine Learning Fairness in Zero-Knowledge
Tianyu Zhang*, Shen Dong*, O. Deniz Kose*, Yanning Shen, Yupeng Zhang
paper · code

Talks

Dynark
UIUC S&P Seminar, SJTU, NYU Crypto Seminar, EUROCRYPT 2026
FairZK
10th Midwest Security Workshop (MSW 2025), SJTU

Awards

2025
Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai
2022–2023
National Scholarship

Service

Subreviewer
EUROCRYPT 2026, IEEE S&P 2027

Miscellaneous

In Music is Our Friend (Live in Washington and Albany, 2021) , Frobert Fripp said, "The world is different, but music remains hope for us all" and here are some pieces of music make me believe the statement is true