📝 Publications

A full publication list is available on [Google Scholar] [Semantic Scholar]

(*: equal contribution; †: project leader)

Multimodal Diagnostics

How Vision Becomes Language: A Layer-wise Information-Theoretic Analysis of Multimodal Reasoning
Hongxuan Wu, Yukun Zhang, Xueqing Zhou
arXiv preprint, 2026
[Paper]
TL;DR: A layer-wise PID framework + causal attention knockouts that quantify “vision → language” transduction across depth, turning mechanistic analysis into a practical diagnostic tool for architecture and inference-time interventions.

Long-Context & Systems

Continuous-Time Attention: PDE-Guided Mechanisms for Long-Sequence Transformers
Yukun Zhang*, Xueqing Zhou*
EMNLP, 2025 (Main)
[Paper][Project][Code]
TL;DR: Reimagines attention as a continuous-time PDE evolution for long sequences; emphasizes algorithm–system co-design via kernel/serving-friendly operators and evidence-first evaluation for long-context efficiency.

Transformer Architecture

Where to Add PDE Diffusion in Transformers
Yukun Zhang*, Xueqing Zhou*
arXiv preprint, 2025
[Paper]
TL;DR: Shows diffusion and attention generally do not commute—placement matters; provides a principled template for composing local-global modules, guiding efficient-architecture design choices under long-sequence constraints.

Transformer Architecture

Understanding Transformer Architecture through Continuous Dynamics: A Partial Differential Equation Perspective
Yukun Zhang*, Xueqing Zhou*
arXiv preprint, 2024
[Paper]
TL;DR: A PDE lens that turns Transformer components into interpretable operators, explaining why stabilizers like residual connections and layer norm are essential—useful for reasoning about stability/efficiency trade-offs in deep architectures.