Wentao Zhang

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 topic:

• Continue learning, evolving and adaption of Foundation Models: Foundation 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 ?

Previously, I also worked on:

• Language modeling with structured data: Large Language (Multimodal) Models co-working 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.

Feel free to reach out to me if you want to discuss any of these topics or interested in collaboration!

I am actively looking for research internship opportunities for Winter/Summer 2027 in Canada/US. If you believe I might be a good fit for your openings, feel free to reach out wtzhang0820 [AT] gmail.com .

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^‡ indicates equal contribution.

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