I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, advised by Prof. Xin (Eric) Wang. I received my M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, where I was honored with the Best Computer Science Research Award. Prior to that, I earned my B.E. in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University and graduated with the distinction of Outstanding Undergraduate.

At USC, I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Jieyu Zhao and Prof. Kuan-Hao Huang.

My research interests primarily lie in multimodal learning and AI agents. Recently, I have been particularly interested in improving the fine-grained reasoning capabilities of multimodal models and in developing open-ended self-improving agents.

🔥 News

• 2026.01:  🎉🎉 one paper accepted at EACL 2026! Check What’s Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning for more details!
• 2025.09: Started my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UCSB.
• 2024.05:  🎉🎉 Honored to receive the Best Computer Science Research Award at USC.

📝 Selected Publications

• Group-Evolving Agents: Open-Ended Self-Improvement via Experience Sharing
  Zhaotian Weng, Antonis Antoniades, Deepak Nathani, Zhen Zhang, Sophia Xiao Pu, Xin (Eric) Wang.
  Under review for a top-tier conference.

• What’s Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning
  Zhaotian Weng, Haoxuan Li, Xin (Eric) Wang, Kuan-Hao Huang, Jieyu Zhao.
  EACL 2026.

• Evaluating and Improving Context-aware Privacy Protection in Vision-Language Models
  Zhaotian Weng, Haoxuan Li, Jieyu Zhao.
  NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Efficient Reasoning.

• Images Speak Louder than Words: Understanding and Mitigating Bias in Vision-Language Models from a Causal Mediation Perspective
  Zhaotian Weng, Zijun Gao, Jerone Andrews, Jieyu Zhao.
  EMNLP 2024.

• BIASINSPECTOR: Detecting Bias in Structured Data through LLM Agents
  Haoxuan Li, Mingyu Derek Ma, Jen-tse Huang, Zhaotian Weng, Wei Wang, Jieyu Zhao.
  arXiv preprint.

• LLM Self-contradictory Hallucination Mitigation via Retrieval-Based Post-Processing
  Zhaotian Weng, Xingjian Dong, Liyan Huang, Jingwen Qi.
  SoCal NLP Symposium 2024.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• Best Computer Science Research Award, University of Southern California
• Outstanding Undergraduate Graduate Honor, Tsinghua University
• Scholarships: Academic Excellence; Scientific Research Excellence; Sports Excellence (Tsinghua University)
• Competitions: 1st prize, National College Students Physics Competition (2020); Honorable Mention, MCM (2022); 1st prize, Tsinghua University Software Development Competition

🎓 Education

• University of California, Santa Barbara
  Ph.D. in Computer Science, Sep. 2025 – Present
  Advisor: Prof. Xin (Eric) Wang

• University of Southern California
  M.S. in Computer Science, Aug. 2023 – May. 2025
  Advisors: Prof. Jieyu Zhao, Prof. Kuan-Hao Huang
  Honor: Best Computer Science Research Award

• Tsinghua University
  B.Eng. in Software Engineering, Sep. 2019 – Jun. 2023
  Honor: Outstanding Undergraduate Graduate Honor

📘 Teaching

• Teaching Assistant, CS 16: Problem Solving (C++)
  University of California, Santa Barbara, Winter 2026

• Course Producer, CSCI 585: Database Systems
  University of Southern California, Fall 2024

🧑‍⚖️ Service

• Conference Reviewer: EMNLP 2024, ARR 2024 (August, October, December), ACL 2025, EMNLP 2025, ARR 2025 October.
• Conference Volunteer: EMNLP 2024

💻 Internships

• Machine Learning Engineer, MockAI
  Los Angeles, CA · Feb. 2024 – May. 2024