Zhen Zhang (Jason)

LLM, Agent, Reasoning, RL, Efficiency

UC, Santa Barbara

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, fortunate to be advised by Professor Xin Eric Wang.

Previously, I was a member of THUNLP supervised by Professor Zhiyuan Liu. In the summer of 2022, I conducted research under Professor Xin Eric Wang at UCSC.

My research focuses on LLM, Agent, Reasoning, RL, Efficiency.

Email Scholar GitHub Twitter LinkedIn

Recent News

2026-01-12 New Homepage is online!

Selected Publications

NeurIPS'25 Soft Thinking: Unlocking the Reasoning Potential of LLMs in Continuous Concept Space

Zhen Zhang, Xuehai He, Weixiang Yan, Ao Shen, Chenyang Zhao, Shuohang Wang, Yelong Shen, Xin Eric Wang

Paper / Code / Project

View All Publications

Experience

GenAI Research Intern

Zoom Inc., GenAI Research Group

June 2025 - September 2025

Worked on Multi-Turn Multi-Step tool Use Agent.

Machine Learning Engineer (Intern)

Microsoft STCA, WebXT — Search & Distribution

Apr 2024 - Sep 2024

Advised by Gong Ming and Wenbiao Ding. Optimized Bing Search models for TL;DR generation in RAG scenarios; designed and implemented pipelines for high-quality training data generation; applied DPO to empower LLMs to reject inappropriate or unanswerable user queries when search results were insufficient, improving response reliability and reducing hallucination risks.

Academic Service

Reviewer

Conferences: NeurIPS 2025, ICLR 2026, ACL 2024+, EMNLP 2024+

Education

2023 - Present

Ph.D. in Computer Science

UC Santa Barbara, USA

Advisor: Prof. Xin Eric Wang

2019 - 2023

B.E. in Physics

Tsinghua University, China