Zhenwei (Joseph) Tang

My research focuses on human behavior modeling with AI/ML: understanding and modeling human decision-making, particularly in strategic domains and AI testbeds such as chess, using large-scale training of models on human behavioral data. My broader interests span LLM evaluation, LLM post-training, knowledge graphs, and recommender systems.

Jun 2026: I joined Google as a Student Researcher.
May 2026: New preprint: RankJudge: A Multi-Turn LLM-as-a-Judge Synthetic Benchmark Generator.
May 2026: Chessformer: A Unified Architecture for Chess Modeling was accepted by ICLR 2026.
May 2026: New preprint: MINER: Mining Multimodal Internal Representation for Efficient Retrieval.
May 2026: New preprint: Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learning.
Apr 2026: Our paper LLM Safety From Within: Detecting Harmful Content with Internal Representations was accepted by ACL 2026.
Apr 2026: New preprint: ThinkTwice: Jointly Optimizing Large Language Models for Reasoning and Self-Refinement.
Mar 2026: New preprint: Grounded Chess Reasoning in Language Models via Master Distillation.
Mar 2026: New preprint: Level Up: Defining and Exploiting Transitional Problems for Curriculum Learning.
Feb 2026: Our paper SWE-Bench Mobile was accepted by KDD 2026.
Feb 2026: I joined Layer 6 AI as a Research Intern.
Oct 2025: New preprint: ChessQA: Evaluating Large Language Models for Chess Understanding.
Aug 2025: SEAM: Semantically Equivalent Across Modalities Benchmark for Vision-Language Models was accepted by COLM 2025, see you in Montreal.
Jul 2025: Our paper Learning to Imitate with Less was accepted by TMLR 2025.
Jul 2025: Maia Chess is now in open beta. Powered by Maia-2, you can play against the most human-like chess AI, analyze games with human-aware AI, and train with Maia as your personal coach.
Jul 2025: I passed the Thesis Topic Approval checkpoint, officially a Ph.D. candidate now.
Apr 2025: Two extended abstracts about human behavior modeling in chess were accepted by IC2S2 2025.
Dec 2024: I passed the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam.
Sep 2024: Maia-2: A Unified Model for Human-AI Alignment in Chess was accepted by NeurIPS 2024 [preprint], try it out on Lichess @ Lichess Bot, see you in Vancouver.
May 2024: Our paper SPIN, on sparsifying and integrating internal neurons in LLMs, was accepted by ACL 2024 Findings.
Apr 2024: Two extended abstracts were accepted by IC2S2 2024, see you in Philly.
Mar 2024: Our paper on predicting protein functions was published in Bioinformatics as part of the ISMB 2024 proceedings.
Nov 2023: LQAC received an Honorable Mention for the Best Paper Award at ISWC 2023.
Sep 2023: I received the ISWC 2023 Travel Award, see you in Athens.
Jun 2023: Our paper Customized Conversational Recommender Systems was accepted by ECML-PKDD 2023.
Jun 2023: Our paper on neural multi-hop logical query answering was accepted by ISWC 2023.
May 2023: Our paper DiffuDetox was accepted by ACL 2023 Findings.
Apr 2023: Two papers, LogicRec and Bayesian Knowledge-driven Critiquing with Indirect Evidence, were accepted by SIGIR 2023.
Nov 2022: I joined the Vector Institute as a Faculty Affiliated Researcher.
Nov 2022: Our paper on self-supervised conversational recommendation was accepted by Elsevier Information Processing & Management (IP&M).
Sep 2022: I began my Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Toronto.
Aug 2022: I completed my M.S. in Computer Science at KAUST.
Jun 2022: I joined L3S Research Center as a Visiting Student.
Apr 2022: Our paper on positive-unlabeled learning for knowledge graph completion was accepted by IJCAI 2022.
Oct 2021: Our paper on cross-domain recommendation was accepted by WSDM 2022.
Jan 2021: I began my M.S. in Computer Science at KAUST.
Jul 2020: I completed my B.S. in Telecommunication Engineering at BUPT.
Jul 2020: I joined the Institute of Computing Technology, CAS as a Research Intern.
May 2020: Our paper on collective learning for mobile UI exploration was accepted by KDD 2020.
Oct 2019: I joined Baidu Research as a Research Intern.
Sep 2016: I began my B.S. in Telecommunication Engineering at BUPT.