--- title: "Ziyu Yao · George Mason University — author profile and papers" description: "Ziyu Yao, George Mason University: 3 papers on Elamur Research (2023–2025), h-index 14 — affiliations, topics, co-authors and who cites…" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ziyu-yao/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ziyu-yao/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [authors](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/) / Ziyu Yao # Ziyu Yao Ziyu Yao has 3 papers in our library, in 2023–2025, most of them on [Language models & pretraining](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/language-models/), [Reasoning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/reasoning/), [Evaluation & benchmarks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/evaluation-benchmarks/); often with [Mengnan Du](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/mengnan-du/), [Xu Wang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/xu-wang/), [Yilun Zhou](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/yilun-zhou/). 3 papers in our library · 2023–2025 [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/A5101616607) · [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4571-3505) · [**h-index 14**](https://openalex.org/authors/A5101616607) · [72 works](https://openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A5101616607) · [836 citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=author.id:A5101616607&sort=cited_by_count:desc) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 [📄 3 works in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ziyu-yao/#papers) · [🔗 Cited 304 times in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ziyu-yao/cited-by/) · [4 more in our library without a page yet](#also) · [⭐ Paper Stars ranking: #8173](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/paper-stars/page/82/#star-8173) The profile is the library's match of the name; two people with one name are not always told apart. Elsewhere: [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=search_authors&mauthors=Ziyu+Yao) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=Ziyu+Yao) · [dblp](https://dblp.org/search?q=Ziyu+Yao) · [ACL Anthology](https://aclanthology.org/search/?q=Ziyu+Yao) ## Affiliations [🎓**George Mason University** Fairfax · United States 2021–2026 · 36 papersEmployment*current*](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/george-mason-university/) · [🎓**The Ohio State University** Columbus · United States 2018–2021 · 9 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/the-ohio-state-university/) · [🎓**Peking University** Beijing · China 2023–2025 · 3 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/peking-university/) · [🎓**Massachusetts Institute of Technology** Cambridge · United States 2023 · 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/massachusetts-institute-of-technology/) · [🎓**Pennsylvania State University** State College · United States 2022 · 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/pennsylvania-state-university/) From the bylines of their papers (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14), ORCID and Wikidata; institutions on papers are matched by machine. 7 more institutions on single bylines are not listed. ## Fields, topics and concepts Of its works in our library, with the number of works on each. 📚 Shelves 5 The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).[Arts and Humanities · 3 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · [Computer Science · 3 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · [Artificial Intelligence · 3 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · [Language and Linguistics · 3 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · [Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/computer-vision-and-pattern-recognition/) 🧭 Topics 3 Research subjects and languages the work is about.[Language models & pretraining · 3 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/language-models/) · [Reasoning · 2 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/reasoning/) · [Evaluation & benchmarks · 1 work](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/evaluation-benchmarks/) ## Works by year ### 2020s [**2025** 2 papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ziyu-yao/year/2025/) · [**2023** 1 paper](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ziyu-yao/year/2023/) ## Papers The most cited first (OpenAlex and our library). 1. **[Can Large Language Models be Good Path Planners? A Benchmark and Investigation on Spatial-temporal Reasoning](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aghzal-2023-large-language-models-good-path/)** *(2023 · 21 citations)* The paper asks whether LLMs can handle tasks that combine spatial understanding with long-horizon planning. 2. **[Feature Extraction and Steering for Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/li-2025-feature-extraction-steering-enhanced-chain/)** *(2025 · 11 citations)* Long chain-of-thought reasoning, as in DeepSeek-R1, improves LLM performance on hard problems. Obtaining it usually requires distillation or post-training on expensive long-CoT data. The authors instead strengthen reasoning at inference time by steering residual activations, using only ordinary (vanilla) CoT. 3. **[All for One: LLMs Solve Mental Math at the Last Token With Information Transferred From Other Tokens](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mamidanna-2025-all-one-llms-solve-mental/)** *(2025 · 6 citations)* The paper asks how much of a transformer's theoretical capacity for cross-token communication LLMs actually use when they do "mental math": one-token answers to two- or three-operand arithmetic, with no chain-of-thought. ## All works 7 works of theirs in our library, the most cited first; 3 with a page here, the others link their original until we summarise them. 1. **[Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Framework and A Text-to-SQL Case Study ↗](https://aclanthology.org/D19-1547/) Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) · no summary yet**Ziyu Yao et al.*2019 · 96 citations* 2. **[A Practical Review of Mechanistic Interpretability for Transformer-Based Language Models ↗](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02646) arXiv:2407.02646 · no summary yet**Daking Rai et al.*2024 · 58 citations* 3. [**Can Large Language Models be Good Path Planners? A Benchmark and Investigation on Spatial-temporal Reasoning arXiv:2310.03249**Mohamed Aghzal, Erion Plaku, Ziyu Yao*2023 · 21 citations*](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aghzal-2023-large-language-models-good-path/) 4. **[Learning Structural Edits via Incremental Tree Transformations ↗](https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12087) arXiv (Cornell University) · no summary yet**Ziyu Yao et al.*2021 · 16 citations* 5. **[Gentopia: A Collaborative Platform for Tool-Augmented LLMs ↗](https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04030) arXiv:2308.04030 · no summary yet**Binfeng Xu et al.*2023 · 15 citations* 6. **[Feature Extraction and Steering for Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/li-2025-feature-extraction-steering-enhanced-chain/) [Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/)**Zihao Li, Xu Wang, Yuzhe Yang, et al.*2025 · 11 citations* 7. **[All for One: LLMs Solve Mental Math at the Last Token With Information Transferred From Other Tokens](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mamidanna-2025-all-one-llms-solve-mental/) [Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/)**Siddarth Mamidanna, Daking Rai, Ziyu Yao, et al.*2025 · 6 citations* ## Co-authors here 4 co-authors with a page, the most papers together first. - [Mengnan Du](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/mengnan-du/) - [Xu Wang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/xu-wang/) - [Yilun Zhou](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/yilun-zhou/) - [Zihao Li](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/zihao-li/) ## Venues Where their works here were published, the most works first, with the editions of those that have a page. - [Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/) ×3: [EMNLP 2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/emnlp/2025/) ×2 - Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) ## Cited by Papers of our library cite their works 304 times (of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read); [51 citing papers with a page here →](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ziyu-yao/cited-by/). Updated 30 October 2026