Zhenhailong Wang

Zhenhailong Wang

Ph.D. in CS at UIUC

Hi there! I’m Zhenhailong Wang (王镇海龙). I am a second year Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) advised by Prof. Heng Ji. Expected graduation in May 2026. Before that, I got my M.S. in Computer Science and Civil Engineering from UIUC and B.S. from Zhejiang University.

My Research

My research focuses on building large multimodal models with human-like perception and reasoning in complex environments. I aim to equip them with the ability to perceive, decide, interact, and learn using system-2 reasoning—engaging in deeper, more thoughtful processes for smarter decisions. For my most recent publications, please check my Google Scholar. I have also been actively involved in several multi-institute research efforts including ECOLE, KAIROS, and AIDA.

Selected Publications

  • Visually Descriptive Language Model for Vector Graphics Reasoning [Paper] [Project Page]
    Zhenhailong Wang, Joy Hsu, Xingyao Wang, Kuan-Hao Huang, Manling Li, Jiajun Wu, Heng Ji
    under review

  • Do LVLMs Understand Charts? Analyzing and Correcting Factual Errors in Chart Captioning [Paper] [Project Page]
    Kung-Hsiang Huang, Mingyang Zhou, Hou Pong Chan, Yi R. Fung, Zhenhailong Wang, Lingyu Zhang, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
    ACL 2024 Findings

  • Unleashing Cognitive Synergy in Large Language Models: A Task-Solving Agent through Multi-Persona Self-Collaboration [Paper] [Code]
    Zhenhailong Wang, Shaoguang Mao, Wenshan Wu, Tao Ge, Furu Wei, Heng Ji
    NAACL 2024

  • Paxion: Patching Action Knowledge in Video-Language Foundation Models [Paper] [Code]
    Zhenhailong Wang, Ansel Blume, Sha Li, Genglin Liu, Jaemin Cho, Zineng Tang, Mohit Bansal, Heng Ji
    NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight

  • RCOT: Detecting and Rectifying Factual Inconsistency in Reasoning by Reversing Chain-of-Thought [Paper]
    Tianci Xue, Ziqi Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Chi Han, Pengfei Yu, Heng Ji
    Arxiv preprint

  • Zemi: Learning Zero-Shot Semi-Parametric Language Models from Multiple Tasks [Paper] [Code]
    Zhenhailong Wang, Xiaoman Pan, Dian Yu, Dong Yu, Jianshu Chen, Heng Ji
    ACL 2023 Findings

  • A Language First Approach for Procedural Planning [Paper]
    Jiateng Liu, Sha Li, Zhenhailong Wang, Manling Li and Heng Ji
    ACL 2023 Findings

  • Language Models with Image Descriptors are Strong Few-Shot Video-Language Learners [Paper][Video] [Code]
    Zhenhailong Wang, Manling Li, Ruochen Xu, Luowei Zhou, Jie Lei, Xudong Lin, Shuohang Wang, Ziyi Yang, Chenguang Zhu, Derek Hoiem, Shih-Fu Chang, Mohit Bansal, Heng Ji
    NeurIPS 2022

  • NewsClaims: A New Benchmark for Claim Detection from News with Background Knowledge [Paper] [Code]
    Revanth Gangi Reddy, Sai Chetan, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi R. Fung, Kathryn Conger, Ahmed Elsayed, Martha Palmer, Preslav Nakov, Eduard Hovy, Kevin Small, Heng Ji
    EMNLP 2022

  • Open Vocabulary Electroencephalography-To-Text Decoding and Zero-shot Sentiment Classification [PDF] [Code]
    Zhenhailong Wang, Heng Ji
    AAAI 2022

  • The Future is not One-dimensional: Complex Event Schema Induction by Graph Modeling for Event Prediction [Paper] [Code]
    Manling Li, Sha Li, Zhenhailong Wang, Lifu Huang, Kyunghyun Cho, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han and Clare Voss
    EMNLP 2021

Experience

Education

  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    • Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2023 - Present; Advisor: Prof. Heng Ji
    • M.S. in Computer Science, 2021 - 2023; Advisor: Prof. Heng Ji
    • M.S. in Civil Engineering, 2019 - 2021; Advisor: Prof. Mani Golparvar-Fard
    • GPA: 3.98/4.0
  • Zhejiang University
    • B.S. in Civil Engineering, 2016 - 2020
    • GPA: 3.92/4.0
    • Zhejiang Province Government Scholarship (<2%)
    • Acadamic Scholarship (<8%)

Invited Talk, Service

Miscellaneous

  • A short film written and directed by me, ft.ITP (dialogue in Chinese :)