Hi, I'm Haotian Sun.
I'm a final-year Ph.D. student in Machine Learning at Georgia Institute of Technology, co-advised by Dr. Bo Dai and Dr. Chao Zhang. I am also fortunate to work closely with Dr. Nan Du as a research intern at Apple.
My research focuses on building scalable foundation models and agentic learning systems across multimodal pretraining, distributed post-training infrastructure, and feedback-driven adaptation.
I've had the privilege of collaborating with researchers at
Apple,
Georgia Tech,
CentraleSupélec,
and 
Xi'an Jiaotong University.
News
- Jul 2026 Released STACX, an open-source modular infrastructure for end-to-end agentic RL.
- Jul 2026 Matryoshka Agent released on arXiv — unfolding sub-agents for long-horizon ML engineering.
- Jun 2026 FReDA released on arXiv — forward-free diffusion language models with BPTT-free looped refinement.
- Dec 2025 Matryoshka Pilot appeared in the NeurIPS 2025 proceedings.
- Sep 2025 AmorLIP accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
- Sep 2025 Matryoshka Pilot accepted to NeurIPS 2025 (co-author).
- May 2025 Started my second research internship at Apple, Foundation Model Team, working on unified multi-modal diffusion.
- Jan 2025 EC-DIT accepted to ICLR 2025.
- Sep 2024 HYDRA accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
- Sep 2024 MedAdapter accepted to EMNLP 2024 (co-author).
- May 2024 Started my first research internship at Apple, Foundation Model Team, working on scaling diffusion transformers.
- May 2024 BBox-Adapter accepted to ICML 2024 as a Spotlight (top 3.5%).
- Sep 2023 AdaPlanner accepted to NeurIPS 2023.
- Sep 2023 ToolQA accepted to NeurIPS 2023 (Datasets & Benchmarks Track).
Featured Projects
STACX: A Modular Infrastructure for End-to-End Agentic RL
Changhao Li* , , Huijie Tang* , Rushi Qiang , Chenxiao Gao
Lab PI: Bo Dai
Open-source infrastructure 2026
Agentic RL, Training infrastructure, Sandboxed evaluation
Forward-Free Diffusion Language Models with BPTT-Free Looped Refinement
, Rushi Qiang , Yuqian Zheng , Bo Dai
arXiv preprint 2026
Diffusion language models, Forward-free training, Looped refinement
Matryoshka Agent: Unfolding Sub-Agents for Long-Horizon Machine Learning Engineering
Rushi Qiang , Changhao Li , , Yuchen Zhuang , Chao Zhang , Bo Dai
arXiv preprint 2026
Hierarchical agents, Long-horizon planning, ML engineering
Matryoshka Pilot: Learning to Drive Black-Box LLMs with LLMs
Changhao Li , Yuchen Zhuang , Rushi Qiang , , Hanjun Dai , Chao Zhang , Bo Dai
Accepted at NeurIPS'25
Black-box LLMs, Agentic control, LLM-as-pilot
AmorLIP: Efficient Language-Image Pretraining via Amortization
, Yitong Li , Yuchen Zhuang , Niao He , Hanjun Dai , Bo Dai
Accepted at NeurIPS'25
Vision-language pretraining, CLIP, Amortized inference
EC-DIT: Scaling Diffusion Transformers with Adaptive Expert-Choice Routing
, Tao Lei , Bowen Zhang , Yanghao Li , Haoshuo Huang , Ruoming Pang , Bo Dai , Nan Du
Accepted at ICLR'25
MoE, Diffusion, Text-to-image synthesis
HYDRA: Model Factorization Framework for Black-Box LLM Personalization
Yuchen Zhuang , , Yue Yu , Rushi Qiang , Qifan Wang , Chao Zhang , Bo Dai
Accepted at NeurIPS'24
Black-box LLMs, Personalization, Recommendation
BBox-Adapter: Lightweight Adapting for Black-Box Large Language Models
, Yuchen Zhuang* , Wei Wei , Chao Zhang , Bo Dai
Accepted at ICML'24 (Spotlight, top 3.5%)
Black-box LLMs, Adaptation, Plug-and-play
AdaPlanner: Adaptive Planning from Feedback with Language Models
, Yuchen Zhuang* , Lingkai Kong , Bo Dai , Chao Zhang
Accepted at NeurIPS'23
Closed-loop adaptive planning, LLM agent, Code interface, Skill discovery
ToolQA: A Dataset for LLM Question Answering with External Tools
Yuchen Zhuang , Yue Yu , Kuan Wang , , Chao Zhang
Accepted at NeurIPS'23 (Datasets and Benchmarks Track)
LLM evaluation, Dataset curation, Tool use