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ZHAO Tianyu 趙天雨

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E-mail: zhaoty.ting[at]gmail.com

Updated on 2026/Jan/23

I am a research engineer working on language models at Sakana AI.

Prior to Sakana AI, I developed multiple Japanese LLMs at rinna as a researcher.


Work Experience

Research Engineer @ Sakana AI 2024.05 - present
| Language Model

Researcher @ rinna Co., Ltd. 2020.10 - 2024.04
| Alignment, Dialogue, and LLM

Research SDE Intern @ Microsoft Development, rinna Team 2019.10 - 2019.12
| Pre-trained models for Japanese dialogues

Education Experience

Ph.D. @ Kyoto University 2017.10 - 2020.9
| Intelligence Science and Technology
| Supervisor: Tatsuya Kawahara

M.Eng. @ Kyoto University 2015.10 - 2017.9
| Intelligence Science and Technology
| Supervisor: Tatsuya Kawahara

B.Sc. @ Peking University 2011.9 - 2015.7
| Computer Science and Technology
| Supervisor: Yunfang Wu


Selected Publications

Fast-weight product key memory
| TyZ and Llion Jones
| paper code (coming soon) arxiv

RePo: language models with context Re-Positioning
| Huayang Li, TyZ, and Richard Sproat
| paper code blog arxiv

Reinforcement learning teachers of test time scaling
| Edoardo Cetin, TyZ, and Yujin Tang
| paper code blog NeurIPS 2025

Sudoku-Bench: Evaluating creative reasoning with Sudoku variants
| Jeffery Seely, Yuki Imajuku, TyZ, Edoardo Cetin, and Llion Jones
| paper code blog dataset arxiv

Large language models to diffusion finetuning
| Edoardo Cetin, TyZ, and Yujin Tang
| paper code ICML 2025

An evolved universal transformer memory
| Edoardo Cetin, Qi Sun, TyZ, and Yujin Tang
| paper code blog ICLR 2025

Release of pre-trained models for the Japanese language
| Kei Sawada, TyZ, Makoto Shing, Kentaro Mitsui, Akio Kaga, Yukiya Hono, Toshiaki Wakatsuki, and Koh Mitsuda
| paper LREC-COLING 2024

Talks

Nekomata: State-of-the-Art Japanese LLM based on Qwen 2024/01/30
| AI Forward: Alibaba Cloud AI & Big Data Summit 2024 @ Singapore
| Link

日本語LLMの最先端 2023/06/29
| Weights and Biases Tokyo Meetup #5 @ Tokyo
| Link

Academic Activities

Reviewer: ACL 2018/2020/2021/2023, ACL ARR, COLING 2020, COLM 2024, EMNLP 2020/2021/2023, IJCNLP 2017/2021, NAACL 2021