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 cryptography and AI safety.

Email: 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-August 2026: Research Intern, Cloudflare Research, working on anonymous credentials

Publications

Nenya: Efficient zkSNARK for Integer Rings Z/2kZ via Reverse Multiplication-Friendly Embeddings
[IEEE S&P 2027]
Tianyu Zhang, Nikita Borisov, Yupeng Zhang

💍 “God made the integers; all else is the work of man.”

AgentAbstain: Do LLM Agents Know When Not to Act?
[NeurIPS 2026 E&D Track, Oral] [paper] [project] [code] [data]
Xun Liu, Yi Evie Zhang, Vira Kasprova, Parisa Rabbani, Pardis Sadat Zahraei, Tianyu Zhang, Ali Ebrahimpour-Boroojeny, Varun Chandrasekaran

🤐 “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Dynark: Making Groth16 Dynamic
[EUROCRYPT 2026] [paper]
Tianyu Zhang, Yupeng Ouyang, Yupeng Zhang

⛵ “Plank by plank, still the ship of Theseus.”

FairZK: A Scalable System to Prove Machine Learning Fairness in Zero-Knowledge
[IEEE S&P 2025] [paper] [code]
Tianyu Zhang, Shen Dong, O. Deniz Kose, Yanning Shen, Yupeng Zhang

⚖️ “Justice is blind.”

Talks

Awards

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