Zhenhailong's Lab · Westlake University · Starting 2027

See the worlds.
Think ahead. Act.

We build general multimodal agents in diverse worlds. Connect perception, prediction, reasoning, and action.

We are actively recruiting · 2027

Join Zhenhailong's Lab

Join us to build a new “frontier lab”. Be a “co-founder”. Help shape our culture and identity from day one.

Apply Now (Google Form)
Lab Principles

Impact first. Ownership and Visibility. Enjoy the journey. Human-Agent Collaboration.

Problems with the form? If you have trouble accessing or submitting it, email the following materials to wangz@westlake.edu.cn.

  • Email subject[PhD/RA/Intern/Postdoc 2027] Name-School
  • MaterialsCV · transcript · one-page research statement

Research Interests

From reactive reasoning to predictive thinking.

Our goal is to build closed-loop multimodal agents that can understand the World (physical / digital / biological / scientific / …), reason about candidate actions, imagine/anticipate possible futures, and learn from what actually happens. See where we are and what comes next.

Perception Prediction Reasoning Action
01 What we have built (Research Achievements)Three bridges toward a unified multimodal agent
Illustration of the closed loop connecting perception, reasoning, and action with feedback from the environment

Modality bridge

Make language, vision, video, structure, and action mutually legible.

  • VidIL ↗NeurIPS 2022100+ citations

    A language-first video learner that converts frames into structured image-and-language descriptors for few-shot video tasks.

  • Paxion ↗NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight50+ citations

    Diagnosed the action-knowledge gap in video-language models and patched temporal action dynamics into frozen foundation models.

  • VDLM ↗TMLRCVPR MAR Spotlight

    Introduced Primal Visual Description, a symbolic bridge from precise vector perception to language reasoning.

  • DyMU ↗NeurIPS 2025

    Dynamically merges—and virtually restores—visual tokens to accelerate VLM inference without permanently discarding information.

Reasoning bridge

Make reasoning collaborative, grounded, and perception-aware.

  • SPP ↗NAACL 2024 Main500+ citations

    An early multi-persona reasoning framework that turns one LLM into a team of specialized, self-collaborating reasoners.

  • PAPO ↗ICLR 202650+ citations

    Introduced perception-aware policy optimization, reducing multimodal perception errors while learning to reason.

  • CAMCUE ↗2026 Preprint

    Grounds natural-language perspective descriptions into camera poses and imagined target views for multi-view spatial reasoning.

  • CreativityBench ↗2026 Preprint

    Introduces a large affordance knowledge base and 14K tasks to test grounded creative tool repurposing in agents.

  • Advances creative physical intelligence through visually grounded exploration and affordance-grounded alignment.

Action bridge

Turn a multimodal model from a brain into an adaptive actor.

  • Mobile-Agent-E ↗NeurIPS SEA Oral100+ citations

    Built a hierarchical mobile agent that improves through persistent tips, shortcuts, and past interaction experience.

  • OSExpert ↗2026 Preprint

    Enables computer-use agents to discover, verify, and compose professional GUI skills through environment exploration.

  • TriMPI ↗ICLR 2026

    Internalizes multimodal policies into conversational agents so interaction skills become native model behavior.

  • MultiAgentBench ↗ACL 2025 Main200+ citations

    A comprehensive benchmark for collaboration and competition across diverse, interactive multi-agent scenarios.

02 What comes next (Research interests)Four directions for predictive thinking, multimodal agents and discovery AI
Comparison of reactive reasoning and predictive thinking, including an internal prediction loop, imagined futures, environmental feedback, and a learning signal
1

Predictive Thinking Models

Internal world modeling, world action models, mental simulation, causal reasoning, and proactive exploration.

2

Multimodal Representations ++

Spatial-temporal, physical, actionable, and scientific representations beyond vision-text.

3

Native Interactive Learning

From data-driven to environment-driven learning, with proactive exploration and recursive self-improvement.

4

AI Agents for Scientific Discovery

Agents that form hypotheses, use tools, design experiments, and validate discoveries across biology, physics, materials, and beyond.

03 The PIZhenhailong Wang · Assistant Professor at Westlake University
Zhenhailong Wang

Zhenhailong Wang will be a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Westlake University starting summer 2027. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UIUC, advised by Prof. Heng Ji. His research spans NLP, large language models, large multimodal models, reasoning, and interactive agents.

He is currently an AI Scientist at Apodex, following research internships at MSRA, Salesforce AI, Amazon, and Tencent AI Lab.

His academic and industry connections span UIUC, Northwestern, CUHK, HKUST, Alibaba, ByteDance, Anthropic, and NVIDIA, supporting research collaborations, academic visits, and industry internships.

  • 2,200+ citations
  • 40+ papers at leading AI venues
  • 7 papers with 100+ citations each
  • 17 H-index
  • 2025 Amazon AICE Ph.D. Fellow
  • Co-PI of the Westlake World Model Research Center
  • NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight · NeurIPS 2025 SEA Oral
  • Invited talks at Tsinghua University, Peking University, and CASIA
  • Former mentees have gone on to UIUC, Stanford, OSU, William & Mary, and SpaceX AI
04 Lab principlesHow we want to work together

Impact first

Papers are a side product of good research. We absorb randomness and pursue durable ideas.

Ownership and visibility

You own your work, credit, visibility, and responsibility (for what you actually contributed).

Enjoy the journey

Ambitious research should still be curious, collaborative, and fun.

Human-Agent Collaboration

Let agentic AI be your friend. We will use a human-agent hybrid management system to handle collaboration, weekly reports, and routine coordination—maximizing your time on meaningful things.

05 Why Westlake UniversityA fast-moving, open, cross-disciplinary research environment

Westlake combines the energy of a rapidly developing research university with an open, PI-driven culture and close connections across AI, engineering, science, medicine, and life sciences.

  • Fast institutional growth and room to define new directions
  • Strong research funding, GPU resources, and support to present accepted work
  • University-wide computing platforms and shared experimental facilities
  • Strong foundations for interdisciplinary AI and AI for Science
  • A beautiful campus in Hangzhou, one of China's most livable and innovative cities