I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh (start from Sept. 2023), a member of EdinburghNLP, supervised by Pasquale Minervini and Mirella Lapata. I interned at Microsfot Research Cambridge in 2025.
My research interests include 1) improving reasoning and perception capabilities of AI in open-ended systems; and 2) enhancing efficiency and faithfulness of black-box models by mechanistic interpretability methods.
Selected Works
Learning GUI Grounding with Spatial Reasoning from Visual Feedback
Yu Zhao, Wei-Ning Chen, Huseyin Atahan Inan, Samuel Kessler, Lu Wang, Lukas Wutschitz, Fangkai Yang, Chaoyun Zhang, Pasquale Minervini, Saravan Rajmohan, Robert Sim
Preprint, 2025
MMLongBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively and Thoroughly
Zhaowei Wang, Wenhao Yu, Xiyu Ren, Jipeng Zhang, Yu Zhao, Rohit Saxena, Liang Cheng, Ginny Wong, Simon See, Pasquale Minervini, Yangqiu Song, Mark Steedman
NeurIPS 2025, Spotlight
Steering Knowledge Selection Behaviours in LLMs via SAE-Based Representation Engineering
Yu Zhao, Alessio Devoto, Giwon Hong, Xiaotang Du, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Hongru Wang, Xuanli He, Kam-Fai Wong, Pasquale Minervini
NAACL 2025, Oral
A Simple and Effective L2 Norm-Based Strategy for KV Cache Compression
Alessio Devoto*, Yu Zhao*, Simone Scardapane, Pasquale Minervini
EMNLP 2024, Oral
Analysing The Impact of Sequence Composition on Language Model Pre-Training
Yu Zhao, Yuanbin Qu, Konrad Staniszewski, Szymon Tworkowski, Wei Liu, Piotr MiĆoĆ, Yuxiang Wu, Pasquale Minervini
ACL 2024, Oral
Structured Packing in LLM Training Improves Long Context Utilization
Konrad Staniszewski, Szymon Tworkowski, Sebastian Jaszczur, Yu Zhao, Henryk Michalewski, Ćukasz KuciĆski, Piotr MiĆoĆ
AAAI 2025, Oral
Are We Done with MMLU?
Aryo Pradipta Gema, Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Giwon Hong, Alessio Devoto, Alberto Carlo Maria Mancino, Rohit Saxena, Xuanli He, Yu Zhao, Xiaotang Du, Mohammad Reza Ghasemi Madani, Claire Barale, Robert McHardy, Joshua Harris, Jean Kaddour, Emile van Krieken, Pasquale Minervini
NAACL 2025
Check out all my publications in Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar.