Yulu Gan

Hi, I am Yulu Gan, a second-year CS PhD at MIT, studying AI and Science. Advised by Tomaso Poggio and Phillip Isola. My research draws inspiration from biological evolution to design algorithms and enable algorithm-hardware co-design, with a focus on understanding and improving LLMs and VLMs. I have interned at Microsoft Research, Cognizant and will be interning at NVIDIA in Santa Clara this summer.

Recent Publications* indicates equal contribution.

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Neural Thickets: Diverse Task Experts Are Dense Around Pretrained WeightsICML 2026 Spotlight

Yulu Gan, Phillip Isola

Notebook preview for Neural Thickets blog A Game of Random Guessing Blog Open notebook Video preview for Neural Thickets Pretrained LLMs Are Surrounded by Task Experts

Evolution Strategies at Scale: LLM Fine-Tuning Beyond Reinforcement LearningICML 2026

Xin Qiu*, Yulu Gan*, Conor F. Hayes*, Qiyao Liang, Yinggan Xu, Roberto Dailey, Elliot Meyerson, Babak Hodjat, Risto Miikkulainen

Video preview for A new way to fine-tune LLMs just dropped A new way to fine-tune LLMs just dropped 48,640 views 2,620 likes 178 comments Video preview for How to Finetune 8 Billion Parameters with Evolution Strategies? How to Finetune 8 Billion Parameters with Evolution Strategies? 3,248 views 151 likes 12 comments Video preview for exploring Evolution Strategies at Scale for LLM Finetuning exploring "Evolution Strategies at Scale for LLM Finetuning" | Deep Learning Study Session 1,168 views 45 likes 11 comments

Selected Awards

McGovern Institute Student Fellow
Dr. Chiang Chen Fellowship
Frederick R. (1953) and Barbara Cronin Fellowship
AAAI Best Student Paper Award (project lead)
Second Place in RoboCup China Open (team lead)
First Place in China Mathematical Olympiad, Zhejiang Division
To be updated.

Reading & Talks

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