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.

😊 Collaboration

I’m always excited to collaborate on research projects. If you are a PhD student or researcher and think our interests align, feel free to reach out via email!

I’m also happy to mentor undergraduate and master’s students interested in research. If you are interested in working together, please don’t hesitate to contact me by email.

🔥 News

• 2026.06:  🎉🎉 I’ve joined Amazon as an Applied Scientist Intern, working on self-improving AI and agents. Excited for the opportunity and looking forward to a great summer!
• 2026.01:  🎉🎉 one paper accepted at EACL 2026 as an Oral Presentation! 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

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

COLM 2026

Paper

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 (Oral)

Paper

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

Heuresis: Search Strategies for Autonomous AI Research Agents Across Quality, Diversity and Novelty

Antonis Antoniades, Deepak Nathani, Ritam Saha, Alfonso Amayuelas, Ivan Bercovich, Zhaotian Weng, Vignesh Baskaran, Kunal Bhatia, William Yang Wang

arXiv preprint

Paper

Survive or Collapse: The Asymmetric Roles of Data Gating and Reward Grounding in Self-Play RL

Sophia Xiao Pu, Zhaotian Weng, Chengzhi Liu, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, William Yang Wang, Xin Eric Wang

arXiv preprint

Paper

🎖 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