Zhen Zhang

Zhen Zhang (张震)

UC, Santa Barbara

I am a Fourth 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 and Efficiency.

Recent News

2026-07 Length Value Model and Group-Evolving Agents were accepted to COLM 2026!
2026-06 Started internship at ByteDance Seed.
2026-01 New Homepage is online!

Selected Publications

Length Value Model: Scalable Value Pretraining for Token-Level Length Modeling

COLM'26 Length Value Model: Scalable Value Pretraining for Token-Level Length Modeling

Zhen Zhang, Changyi Yang, Zijie Xia, Zhen Yang, Chengzhi Liu, Zhaotian Weng, Yepeng Liu, Haobo Chen, Jin Pan, Chenyang Zhao, Yuheng Bu, Alkesh Patel, Zhe Gan, Xin Eric Wang

CM2: Reinforcement Learning with Checklist Rewards for Multi-Turn and Multi-Step Agentic Tool Use

arXiv CM2: Reinforcement Learning with Checklist Rewards for Multi-Turn and Multi-Step Agentic Tool Use

Zhen Zhang, Kaiqiang Song, Xun Wang, Yebowen Hu, Weixiang Yan, Chenyang Zhao, Henry Peng Zou, Haoyun Deng, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Shujian Liu, Simin Ma, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Eric Wang, Song Wang

Group-Evolving Agents: Open-Ended Self-Improvement via Experience Sharing

COLM'26 Group-Evolving Agents: Open-Ended Self-Improvement via Experience Sharing

Zhaotian Weng, Antonis Antoniades, Deepak Nathani, Zhen Zhang, Xiao Pu, Xin Eric Wang

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

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

Tool Learning with Foundation Models

ACM CSUR'24 Tool Learning with Foundation Models

Yujia Qin, Shengding Hu, Yankai Lin, Weize Chen, Ning Ding, Ganqu Cui, Zheni Zeng, Xuanhe Zhou, Yufei Huang, Chaojun Xiao, Chi Han, Yi Ren Fung, Yusheng Su, Huadong Wang, Cheng Qian, Runchu Tian, Kunlun Zhu, Shihao Liang, Xingyu Shen, Bokai Xu, Zhen Zhang, Yining Ye, Bowen Li, Ziwei Tang, Jing Yi, Yuzhang Zhu, Zhenning Dai, Lan Yan, Xin Cong, Yaxi Lu, Weilin Zhao, Yuxiang Huang, Junxi Yan, Xu Han, Xian Sun, Dahai Li, Jason Phang, Cheng Yang, Tongshuang Wu, Heng Ji, Guoliang Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing

NAACL'24 Short Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing

Jiabao Ji*, Bairu Hou*, Zhen Zhang*, Guanhua Zhang*, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Yang Zhang, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Shiyu Chang

Parameter-Efficient Cross-Lingual Transfer of Vision and Language Models via Translation-Based Alignment

EMNLP'23 Findings Parameter-Efficient Cross-Lingual Transfer of Vision and Language Models via Translation-Based Alignment

Zhen Zhang, Jialu Wang, Xin Eric Wang

OpenDelta: A Plug-and-Play Library for Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Models

ACL'23 Demo OpenDelta: A Plug-and-Play Library for Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Models

Shengding Hu, Ning Ding, Weilin Zhao, Xingtai Lv, Zhen Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Experience

Student Researcher

Bytedance Inc, Seed Team

June 2026 - Now

Work on LLM post-training and RL scaling.

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

Optimized Bing Search models for TL;DR generation in RAG scenarios; data generation pipelines; reducing hallucination risks with DPO.

Academic Service

Reviewer

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

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