Zeping Yu

Zeping Yu

University of Manchester

đź“– About Me

I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, supervised by Prof. Sophia Ananiadou. Previously, I worked as a Research Scientist at Tencent in Shanghai. I received both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where I was supervised by Prof. Gongshen Liu.

My research focuses on understanding and improving large language models. I follow a diagnose-and-improve paradigm. My research interests include mechanistic interpretability, large language models, and multimodal large language models. In particular, I am interested in understanding how model capabilities emerge, identifying the mechanisms behind their successes and failures, and translating mechanistic insights into more capable, reliable, and effective AI systems.

đź“ť Publications

  • Back Attention: Understanding and Enhancing Multi-Hop Reasoning in Large Language Models

    Zeping Yu, Yonatan Belinkov, Sophia Ananiadou EMNLP 2025 (Main)

  • Locate-then-Merge: Neuron-Level Parameter Fusion for Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting

    Zeping Yu, Sophia Ananiadou EMNLP 2025 (Findings)

  • Interpreting Arithmetic Mechanism in Large Language Models through Comparative Neuron Analysis

    Zeping Yu, Sophia Ananiadou EMNLP 2024 (Main)

  • Understanding and Mitigating Gender Bias in LLMs via Interpretable Neuron Editing

    Zeping Yu, Sophia Ananiadou preprint

  • Neuron-Level Knowledge Attribution in Large Language Models

    Zeping Yu, Sophia Ananiadou EMNLP 2024 (Main)

  • How do Large Language Models Learn In-Context? Query and Key Matrices of In-Context Heads are Two Towers for Metric Learning

    Zeping Yu, Sophia Ananiadou EMNLP 2024 (Main)

  • Understanding Multimodal LLMs: the Mechanistic Interpretability of LLaVA in VQA

    Zeping Yu, Sophia Ananiadou preprint

  • CodeCMR: Cross-modal retrieval for function-level binary source code matching

    Zeping Yu, Wenxin Zheng, Jiaqi Wang, Qiyi Tang, Sen Nie, Shi Wu NeurIPS 2020

  • Order matters: Semantic-aware neural networks for binary code similarity detection

    Zeping Yu*, Rui Cao* , Qiyi Tang, Sen Nie, Junzhou Huang, Shi Wu AAAI 2020

  • Adaptive User Modeling with Long and Short-Term Preferences for Personalized Recommendation

    Zeping Yu, Jianxun Lian, Ahmad Mahmoody, Gongshen Liu, Xing Xie IJCAI 2019