Yifei Zhang

Yifei Zhang (张逸飞)

Per aspera ad astra

Hi, I am Yifei Zhang (张逸飞), a master's student in Financial Engineering and Fintech at Nanjing University's School of Management & Engineering, advised by Prof. Honghai Yu. I hold a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Technology from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Nanjing University, where I specialized in Computer & Financial Engineering Experimental Class (a Top Talent Program).

I was a research intern at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) from May 2025 to January 2026, advised by Xiao Yang, focusing on Autonomous Agent research. Previously, I had the privilege of collaborating with Prof. Benyou Wang and Prof. Qianqian Xie on exploring Large Language Models in Finance.

I have published at top-tier conferences including NeurIPS and NAACL. Notably, one of my papers received the Best Paper Award at the ICLR 2025 Workshop on Advances in Financial AI, where I presented it as an oral presentation in Singapore. My research interests span LLM Agents, Autonomous Agents, and Financial Applications of LLMs.

📄 More about me: English Resume | 中文简历

I am currently seeking internship opportunities, preferably internship-to-full-time roles (summer / spring are both welcome). Preferred locations: Jiang-Zhe-Hu (江浙沪) (flexible for great opportunities).

News

Selected Publications

* indicates equal contribution · Google Scholar · Detailed Publications

RD-Agent Project
A unified research line on autonomous ML engineering agents. The technical report defines the RD-Agent framework, while the two follow-up papers study how the same project scales to Machine Learning Engineering (MLE) optimization and autonomous LLM fine-tuning.
RD-Agent Project...
R&D-Agent: An LLM-Agent Framework Towards Autonomous Data Science (Technical Report)
Xu Yang, Xiao Yang, Shikai Fang, Yifei Zhang, Jian Wang, et al.
arXiv preprint 2025
A top-performing open-source framework on MLE-Bench that structures autonomous data science into two parts: Research for proposing ideas and Development for turning them into executable solutions.
arXiv
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search (MLE Setting of RD-Agent)
Yifei Zhang*, Xu Yang*, Xiao Yang*, Bowen Xian, Qizheng Li, et al.
arXiv preprint 2026
The MLE setting of RD-Agent, where Gome sets the strongest open-source MLE result on MLE-Bench under a closed-world protocol. Its main finding is that as model reasoning capabilities improve, gradient-based optimization increasingly outperforms gradient-free tree search.
arXiv
FT-Dojo: Towards Autonomous LLM Fine-Tuning with Language Agents (Fine-Tuning Setting of RD-Agent)
Qizheng Li*, Yifei Zhang*, Xiao Yang*, Xu Yang*, Zhuo Wang, et al.
arXiv preprint 2026
The fine-tuning setting of RD-Agent, introducing an interactive benchmark with 13 tasks across 5 domains and FT-Agent, which achieves the best results on 10 of 13 tasks.
arXiv
TwinMarket: A Scalable Behavioral and Social Simulation for Financial Markets
Yuzhe Yang*, Yifei Zhang*, Minghao Wu*, Kaidi Zhang, Yunmiao Zhang, et al.
🏆 Best Paper Award @ ICLR 2025 Workshop on Advances in Financial AI (1/53)
NeurIPS 2025
TL;DR: A multi-agent simulation platform for financial markets that integrates behavioral economics and social network dynamics, enabling large-scale market experiments with diverse agent behaviors.
Paper Code...
AI-Trader: Benchmarking Autonomous Agents in Real-Time Financial Markets
Tianyu Fan, Yuhao Yang, Yangqin Jiang, Yifei Zhang, Yuxuan Chen, Chao Huang, et al.
🚀 Fully-automated and data-uncontaminated benchmark for LLM agents in finance
arXiv preprint 2025
TL;DR: A comprehensive benchmark for evaluating autonomous trading agents in real-time financial markets across NASDAQ 100, SSE 50, and cryptocurrency markets, enabling fair comparison of AI trading strategies.
Paper Code...
UCFE: A User-Centric Financial Expertise Benchmark for Large Language Models
Yuzhe Yang*, Yifei Zhang*, Yan Hu*, Yilin Guo, Ruoli Gan, et al.
🤗 #1 Paper of the day on Hugging Face
NAACL Findings 2025
TL;DR: A comprehensive benchmark evaluating LLMs' financial expertise from a user-centric perspective, covering domain knowledge, application capabilities, and trustworthiness across 300+ real-world questions.
Paper Code...

Experiences

Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA)
2025.05 – 2026.01
Research Intern
Focusing on Autonomous Agent research | Advised by Xiao Yang
Nanjing University
2024.09 – Present
Master's Student in Financial Engineering and Fintech
School of Management & Engineering | Advised by Prof. Honghai Yu
CUHK-Shenzhen NLP Group
2024.07 – 2025.05
Research Assistant
Exploring Large Language Models in Finance | Advised by Prof. Benyou Wang
Nanjing University
2020.09 – 2024.06
Bachelor in Computer Science and Technology
Computer & Financial Engineering Experimental Class (Top Talent Program)
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