Wentao Zhang
PhD Student, University of Waterloo
wtzhang0820 [AT] gmail.com
Bio
Hi, I am a PhD student at University of Waterloo. I am honored to be advised by Prof. Yuntian Deng. Before that I got my Master in Computer Science degree at UIUC, where I worked in Data Mining Group. I received my Bechalor's degree from Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), under the supervision of Prof. Weinan Zhang and Prof. Yong Yu
My research interests are Natural Language Processing/Understanding and Information Retrieval. Recently I am focusing on following topics:
- Continue learning, evolving and adaption of Large Language Models: Large language models are powerful, but they need to be updated. How to efficiently but effectively update them so that they can adapt to new task, new domains and incorporate new knowledge ?
- Language modeling with structured data: Large Language (Multimodal) Models succedded in modeling and reasoning on seqential data or unstructured data, such as text, images, and videos. But how can we incooperate language models with structured data, such as information network, knowledge graphs, taxonomy, event triplets, and tabular data ?
- Representation learning, information retrieval and their applications: Good represetations matters, they connect different modalities and models. Training representations for various task is a long lasting problem.
I am actively looking for research internship opportunities for Summer/Fall 2026 in Canada/US. If you believe I might be a good fit for your openings, feel free to reach out wtzhang0820 [AT] gmail.com .
News
Publications
Full publications on Google
Scholar.
‡ indicates equal contribution.
From Chat Logs to Collective Insights: Aggregative Question Answering
Wentao Zhang, Woojeong Kim, Yuntian Deng
EMNLP 2025 (Oral)
Interactive Training: Feedback-Driven Neural Network Optimization
Wentao Zhang, Yang Young Lu, Yuntian Deng
EMNLP 2025 (System Demo Track)
Patton: Language Model Pretraining on Text-Rich Networks
Bowen Jin, Wentao Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Meng, Xinyang Zhang, Qi Zhu and Jiawei Han
ACL 2023 (Oral)
Learning Multiplex Embeddings on Text-rich Networks with One Text Encoder
Bowen Jin, Wentao Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yu Meng, Han Zhao, Jiawei Han
NeurIPs 2023 New Frontiers in Graph Learning
Spatio-Temporal Meta Learning for Urban Traffic Prediction
Zheyi Pan, Wentao Zhang, Yuxuan Liang, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu, Junbo Zhang, Yu Zheng
Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Teaching
Professional Exerience
