Zhiyuan Jerry Lin

Research Scientist @Meta Applied AI, ex-CAS/CDS. Human-in-the-loop optimization, Bayesian methods, and sample-efficient learning from feedback. Stanford CS PhD.

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@karpathy Yes, I do this a lot (probably too much 😅). I tend to think this as the human CoT , which could be more important context than some polished prompts for the LLM to condition its response on.

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

“I like this direction, but it’s optimizing the wrong notion of good.”

#ICML2026: we are presenting LILO: Bayesian optimization w/ language feedback on Thur (7/9), 10:30–12:15 Hall A #3612
https://t.co/dVrbEi6xzM

Grounded route to language-guided agent improvement. Let's chat.

[Katarzyna (Kasia) Kobalczyk @kasia_kobalczyk]

Preference optimization often reduces feedback to comparisons or rankings

But decision makers often know more than “A >> B”

They can explicitly state their preferences and priors in words

LILO is a new framework turning such feedback into signal for Bayesian Optimization

🧵

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

Paper here: https://t.co/y4IyGQHns9

More details on how LILO turns language feedback and prior knowledge into BO-driven, uncertainty-aware optimization.

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

Excited to present LILO at #ICML2026.

One lens: a principled auto-research-style harness built on Bayesian optimization. LLMs surface deep prior knowledge and capture language feedback; BO turns it into uncertainty-aware search/exploration.

I’ll be at the poster. Let’s chat!

[Katarzyna (Kasia) Kobalczyk @kasia_kobalczyk]

Preference optimization often reduces feedback to comparisons or rankings

But decision makers often know more than “A >> B”

They can explicitly state their preferences and priors in words

LILO is a new framework turning such feedback into signal for Bayesian Optimization

🧵

[Max Balandat @MaxBalandat]

Check out our work on LILO led by @kasia_kobalczyk and @ItsMrLin. LILO allows users to perform black box optimization with natural language feedback.

Hope to see you at the poster at #ICML2026
Paper: https://t.co/d94kfL4AIB

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@msbernst Congrats, Michael!!

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@CaoHancheng @EmoryUniversity @EmoryGoizueta Congratulations!! Atlanta would be fun!

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@tianle_cai Why am I even surprised...

[Chirag Nagpal @nagpalchirag]

My kindest sympathies for the Bayesian Optimization folks

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@infoxiao This you mean

[Max Balandat @MaxBalandat]

2024 PhD Internship opportunity! Join me and my amazing colleagues on Meta's Adaptive Experimentation team to work on Bayesian optimization, probabilistic modeling / Gaussian Processes, and sample-efficient decision making: https://t.co/5uR0NNXLQU

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

Glad to see this conference has gotten noticeably bigger and better with more folks from even broader backgrounds 😃

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

Spotted @infoxiao at @CODEConference this year!

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@5harad Congrats! Amazing to see this being officially published!

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@MinaLee__ @UChicagoCS @DSI_UChicago @universeinanegg @ChenhaoTan Congrats!!

[Yann LeCun @ylecun]

You knew that was coming: Code LLama !!!
- Llama-2 tuned for code generation, debugging, etc
- base models, Python-specific, and instruction-tuned.
- 7B, 13B and 33B params models
- Available with the same license as Llama-2
- Blog: https://t.co/SBU5go1wcY
- Paper: https://t.co/mDws7g6Ibf
- Code: https://t.co/HR9D0iDnEk
- Models: https://t.co/dIuk96kdne

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@DrJimFan It’s nice to see how much the “usual LLM agenda” has been added compared to when I first took this class 5 (or 6?) years ago…

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

Finally I can start preying on predatory journals.

[andrew gao @itsandrewgao]

Go to Google Scholar and look up ‘As an AI language model” -“ChatGPT”’

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

It just occurred to me that it's been a while since I used a non-dark-themed IDE. Is this the industry standard now? Miss my old Eclipse days (not really).

[Zhiyuan Jerry Lin @ItsMrLin]

@anothercohen lmao this is amazing