Gavin (Jialun) Zhang

About Me

Hello! My name is Gavin. I'm a research scientist on the Kernels and Optimizations Team at Meta Superintelligence Labs . I was previously part of the AI and Systems Co-Design team. I am interested in various aspects of pretraining for large language models. Currently I am working on:

• Enhancing training stability in large-scale pretraining for LLMs
• Matrix-based optimizers like Distributed Shampoo and Muon

I finished my PhD in 2024 from the ECE department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worked on preconditioned gradient methods for matrix optimization. My advisor was Richard Y. Zhang.

Previously, I received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, and a master's degree in computational mathematics from Stanford.