Youpeng Zhao

赵有朋

youpeng.zhao [at] ucf [dot] edu

Brief Bio

I am a final-year PhD student at the University of Central Florida. I build efficient, scalable, and reliable machine learning systems (MLSys) for large-scale foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs). I am one of the cohorts for MLSys Rising Stars 2025.

• 08/2025-02/2026: Student researcher at Google. I worked on on-device optimization for Gemini.
  
• 05/2025-08/2025: Research Intern at Microsoft Research. I worked on system-driven test-time scaling for reasoning models.
  
• 05/2024-08/2024: Research Intern at d-Matrix. I worked on system optimization for diffusion models.
  
• 03/2021-07/2022: ML Researcher at Samsung Research China. I worked on efficient deep learning for mobile devices.
  

Links

• Selected Publications. Full list can be found in my Google Scholar.
  
• LinkedIn.
  
• GitHub.
  

Fun Facts

• I used to play some elecctronic keyboard and won a national prize in 2008 🎹
• My first name is Youpeng (有朋), which in Chinese, means having friends from all over the world 🤓
• My English name is Kenneth, but people usually call me Ken or Kenny 😎