Victor Zhong

[email protected] · victorzhong.com · Waterloo, ON

Experience

Assistant Professor 2024 – Present

University of Waterloo

Canada CIFAR AI Chair 2024 – Present

Vector Institute

Scientific Advisory Committee 2026 – Present

Vector Institute

Postdoc Researcher 2023 – 2024

Microsoft Research New York City

Visiting Researcher 2021 – 2022

Meta AI Research Seattle

Research Intern 2020

Google Brain Robotics

Research Intern 2019

Meta AI Research London

Founding Research Scientist 2016 – 2018

Salesforce Research

Research Scientist 2015

MetaMind

Compiler Software Engineer 2012 – 2013

Altera

Education

PhD in Computer Science 2018 – 2023

University of Washington

Master of Science in Computer Science 2014 – 2016

Stanford University

Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering 2009 – 2014

University of Toronto

Teaching

CS486/686 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 2025-01 Winter

CS886 - Natural Language Processing for Machine Learning 2025-05 Spring

CS486/686 - Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 2025-09 Fall

CS489 - Introduction to Natural Language Processing 2026-01 Winter

CS886 - Vision-Language Models - Architectures, Training, and Frontiers 2026-09 Fall

Organizing Committees

Autonomous LLM Agents Thematic Semester 2025

IVADO

First workshop on Interactive Executable Semantic Parsing (IntEx-SemPar) 2020

EMNLP

First workshop on Language in Reinforcement Learning (LaReL) 2020

ICML

Program Committees

NeurIPS 2018 – Present

ACL (Area Chair) 2018 – Present

ICML 2019 – Present

ICLR (Area Chair) 2018 – Present

EMNLP 2018 – 2024

COLM (Area Chair) 2025 – Present

NAACL 2018 – 2020

CoRL 2019 – 2021

CoNLL 2018 – 2020

Grants

NSERC Alliance: Deep Research Agents for Natural Science R&D 2026

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Research Tools and Instruments: A High-Performance Platform for Synthesizing AI Training Data 2026

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Ontario Research Fund - Research Excellence: Privacy-Aware Language Agents via Post-Deployment Learning and Adaptation 2025

Government of Ontario

John R. Evans Leaders Fund: Privacy-Aware Language Agents via Post-Deployment Learning and Adaptation 2025

Canada Foundation for Innovation

Canada CIFAR AI Chair 2024

Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

Faculty Member 2024

Vector Institute

Discovery Grant 2024

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Sponsorship

Automated Induction of Heterogeneous Data Interfaces 2026

TD Layer6 AI

Context Management for Agents 2026

Amazon Research Awards

Natural Language Querying over Data Lakes 2026

Vector Institute

AI for Chemistry 2025

BASF

Compositional Skill Induction 2025

Salesforce Research

Natural Language Querying over Data Lakes 2025

TD Layer6 AI

User Agent Modeling 2025

ServiceNow AI Research

Computer Agent Arena 2024

Amazon AWS

Spider 2 2024

Snowflake

Language Feedback Models 2024

Microsoft Research

Students

Samin Mehdizadeh Sani 2026

PhD student

Dongchan Shin 2026

PhD student

Mia (Yun-Yun) Tsai 2026

MS student

Zhiyuan Sun 2025

PhD student

Sitao Cheng 2025

PhD student

Michael Solodko 2025

MS Student

Yuxuan Li 2024

PhD student

Publications

ASH: Agents that Self-Hone via Embodied Learning 2026

Neural Information Processing Systems. Presented at ICML Workshop on Scalable Learning and Optimization for Efficient Multimodal AI Agents

Benjamin Schneider, Xavier Schneider, Victor Zhong, Sun Sun

LakeQuest: A Three-Domain Benchmark for Grounded Question Answering across Data Lakes 2026

Conference on Language Modeling

Michael Solodko, Steven Gong, Guangwei Yu, Satya Krishna Gorti, Jesse C. Cresswell, Victor Zhong

AgentIR: Reasoning-Aware Retrieval for Deep Research Agents 2026

Conference on Language Modeling

Zijian Chen, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Jimmy Lin, Akari Asai, Victor Zhong

From Atomic to Composite: Reinforcement Learning Enables Generalization in Complementary Reasoning 2026

ICLR Workshop on Scaling Post-training for LLMs

Sitao Cheng, Xunjian Yin, Ruiwen Zhou, Yuxuan Li, Xinyi Wang, Liangming Pan, William Yang Wang, Victor Zhong

DSCode Comparator: An Interactive Interface for Comparing Models and Evaluating Code for Data Science Tasks 2026

Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces

Xinxin Yu, Victor Zhong, Anamaria Crisan

Computer Agent Arena: Toward Human-Centric Evaluation and Analysis of Computer-Use Agents 2026

International Conference on Learning Representations

Bowen Wang, Xinyuan Wang, Jiaqi Deng, Tianbao Xie, Ryan Li, Yanzhe Zhang, Junli Wang, Dunjie Lu, Zicheng Gong, Gavin Li, Toh Jing Hua, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ion Stoica, Diyi Yang, Yu Su, Yi Zhang, Zhiguo Wang, Victor Zhong, Tao Yu

Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Agents via Environment Interaction 2026

International Conference on Learning Representations

Arthur Chen, Zuxin Liu, Jianguo Zhang, Akshara Prabhakar, Zhiwei Liu, Shelby Heinecke, Silvio Savarese, Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong

SYNQUE: Estimating Synthetic Dataset Quality Without Annotations 2026

Transactions on Machine Learning Research. Presented at ICLR 2026 Workshop on Navigating and Addressing Data Problems for Foundation Models

Arthur Chen, Victor Zhong

How well can LLMs provide planning feedback in grounded environments? 2026

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing - Findings. Presented at COLM 2025 Workshop on AI Agents: Capabilities and Safety

Yuxuan Li, Victor Zhong

OpenCUA: Open foundations for computer-use agents 2025

Neural Information Processing Systems

Xinyuan Wang, Bowen Wang, Dunjie Lu, Junlin Yang, Tianbao Xie, Junli Wang, Jiaqi Deng, Xiaole Guo, Yiheng Xu, Chen Henry Wu, Zhennan Shen, Zhuokai Li, Ryan Li, Xiaochuan Li, Junda Chen, Boyuan Zheng, Peihang Li, Fangyu Lei, Ruisheng Cao, Yeqiao Fu, Dongchan Shin, Martin Shin, Jiarui Hu, Yuyan Wang, Jixuan Chen, Yuxiao Ye, Danyang Zhang, Dikang Du, Hao Hu, Huarong Chen, Zaida Zhou, Haotian Yao, Ziwei Chen, Qizheng Gu, Yipu Wang, Heng Wang, Diyi Yang, Victor Zhong, Flood Sung, Charles Y, Zhilin Yang, Tao Yu

Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows 2025

International Conference on Learning Representations

Fangyu Lei, Jixuan Chen, Yuxiao Ye, Ruisheng Cao, Dongchan Shin, Hongjin Su, Zhaoqing Suo, Hongcheng Gao, Wenjing Hu, Pengcheng Yin, Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Ruoxi Sun, Qian Liu, Sida Wang, Tao Yu

Spider2-V: How Far Are Multimodal Agents From Automating Data Science and Engineering Workflows? 2024

Neural Information Processing Systems

Ruisheng Cao, Fangyu Lei, Haoyuan Wu, Jixuan Chen, Yeqiao Fu, Hongcheng Gao, Xinzhuang Xiong, Hanchong Zhang, Yuchen Mao, Wenjing Hu, Tianbao Xie, Hongshen Xu, Danyang Zhang, Sida Wang, Ruoxi Sun, Pengcheng Yin, Caiming Xiong, Ansong Ni, Qian Liu, Victor Zhong, Lu Chen, Kai Yu, Tao Yu

OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments 2024

Neural Information Processing Systems

Tianbao Xie, Danyang Zhang, Jixuan Chen, Xiaochuan Li, Siheng Zhao, Ruisheng Cao, Toh Jing Hua, Zhoujun Cheng, Dongchan Shin, Fangyu Lei, Yitao Liu, Yiheng Xu, Shuyan Zhou, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Victor Zhong, Tao Yu

Policy Improvement using Language Feedback Models 2024

Neural Information Processing Systems

Victor Zhong, Dipendra Misra, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté

Text2Reward: Automated Dense Reward Function Generation for Reinforcement Learning 2024

International Conference on Learning Representations

Tianbao Xie, Siheng Zhao, Chen Henry Wu, Yitao Liu, Qian Luo, Victor Zhong, Yanchao Yang, Tao Yu

BioMANIA: Simplifying bioinformatics data analysis through conversation 2023

Preprint

Zhengyuan Dong, Victor Zhong, Yang Young Lu

When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness and Limitations of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories 2023

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Alex Mallen, Akari Asai, Victor Zhong, Rajarshi Das, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Daniel Khashabi

RoMQA: A Benchmark for Robust, Multi-evidence, Multi-answer Question Answering 2023

Findings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Victor Zhong, Weijia Shi, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer

M2D2: A Massively Multi-Domain Language Modeling Dataset 2022

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Machel Reid, Victor Zhong, Suchin Gururangan, Luke Zettlemoyer

Improving Policy Learning via Language Dynamics Distillation 2022

Neural Information Processing Systems

Victor Zhong, Jesse Mu, Luke Zettlemoyer, Edward Grefenstette, Tim Rocktäschel

Improving Intrinsic Exploration with Language Abstractions 2022

Neural Information Processing Systems

Jesse Mu, Victor Zhong, Roberta Raileanu, Minqi Jiang, Noah Goodman, Tim Rocktäschel, Edward Grefenstette

UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models 2022

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu

SILG: The Multi-environment Symbolic Interactive Language Grounding Benchmark 2021

Neural Information Processing Systems

Victor Zhong, Austin W. Hanjie, Karthik Narasimhan, Luke Zettlemoyer

Grounding Language to Entities and Dynamics for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning 2021

International Conference on Machine Learning

Austin W. Hanjie, Victor Zhong, Karthik Narasimhan

LEWIS: Levenshtein Editing for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer 2021

Findings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Machel Reid, Victor Zhong

Grounded Adaptation for Zero-shot Executable Semantic Parsing 2020

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Victor Zhong, Mike Lewis, Sida I. Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer

RTFM: Generalising to Novel Environment Dynamics via Reading 2020

International Conference on Learning Representations

Victor Zhong, Tim Rocktäschel, Edward Grefenstette

E3: Entailment-driven Extracting and Editing for Conversational Machine Reading 2019

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Victor Zhong, Luke Zettlemoyer

Multi-hop Reading Comprehension through Question Decomposition and Rescoring 2019

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Sewon Min, Victor Zhong, Luke Zettlemoyer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Coarse-grain Fine-grain Coattention Network for Multi-evidence Question Answering 2019

International Conference on Learning Representations

Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Richard Socher

Global-Locally Self-Attentive Dialogue State Tracker 2018

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher

Efficient and Robust Question Answering from Minimal Context over Documents 2018

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Sewon Min, Victor Zhong, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong

DCN+: Mixed Objective and Deep Residual Coattention for Question Answering 2018

International Conference on Learning Representations

Caiming Xiong, Victor Zhong, Richard Socher

Position-aware Attention and Supervised Data Improve Slot Filling 2017

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Yuhao Zhang, Victor Zhong, Danqi Chen, Gabor Angeli, Christopher D. Manning

Dynamic Coattention Networks for Question Answering 2017

International Conference on Learning Representations

Caiming Xiong, Victor Zhong, Richard Socher

Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning 2017

Preprint CoRR abs/1709.00103

Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher

Ask Me Anything: Dynamic Memory Networks for Natural Language Processing 2016

International Conference on Machine Learning

Ankit Kumar, Ozan Irsoy, Jonathan Su, James Bradbury, Robert English, Brian Pierce, Peter Ondruska, Ishaan Gulrajani, Victor Zhong, Romain Paulus, Richard Socher

Bootstrapped Self Training for Knowledge Base Population 2015

Text Analysis Conference

Gabor Angeli, Victor Zhong, Danqi Chen, Arun Chaganty, Jason Bolton, Melvin Johnson Premkumar, Pasupat Panupong, Sonal Gupta, Christopher D Manning

Patents

Question answering from minimal context over documents 2022

Sewon Min, Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher

Generating dual sequence inferences using a neural network model 2021

Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher

Dynamic coattention network for question answering 2021

Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher

Dialogue state tracking using a global-local encoder 2021

Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher

Neural network based translation of natural language queries to database queries 2020

Victor Zhong, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher

Talks

Multimodal Retrieval for Chemistry 2026-07

BASF

Retrieval, agents, and verification for complex industrial environments 2026-06

DENSO

Agents that Retrieve, Adapt, and Self-Improve at Deployment 2026-06

CANAI

Agents that learn efficiently 2026-04

TD Layer 6

Building and Evaluating Generalist Agents 2025-08

IVADO Thematic Semester - Autonomous LLM Agents, Risks and Scientific Challenges

From Text-to-SQL to Agentic Search - The Future of Natural Language Data Interfaces 2025-08

KDD 2025 AI Canada Day

Building and Evaluating Generalist Agents 2025-07

Workshop on Computer Use Agents at ICML 2025

Building and Evaluating Generalist Agents 2025-05

Bloomberg CTO Data Science Speaker Series

Beyond Text2SQL 2025-05

Vector Institute Endless Summer School

From Text-to-SQL to Agentic Search - The Future of Natural Language Data Interfaces 2025-05

CCC’s Computing Futures Symposium

Building and Evaluating Generalist AI Agents 2025-01

AMD Tech Talks

Building and Evaluating Generalist Language Agents 2025-01

Vector Institute Distinguished Lecture Series

Generalist Language Agents in General Purpose Operating Systems 2024-10

University of Waterloo AI for Good lab

Generalist Language Agents in General Purpose Operating Systems 2024-10

McMaster Computing and Software Department Seminar

NLP Lecture 2024-07

Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer School

From Reading to Do to Reading to Learn 2024-01

Peking University

From Reading to Do to Reading to Learn 2023-11

UT Austin

From Reading to Do to Reading to Learn 2023-09

Cornell Tech

Reading to learn 2023-05

Google Research Seattle

Reading to learn 2023-03

Salesforce Research Singapore

Robust question answering 2022-10

Meta AI NLP

Robust question answering 2022-09

UBC NLP

Robust question answering 2022-08

Apple Seattle

Reading to learn 2022-07

Apple AI/ML

Reading to learn 2022-06

NAACL 2022 Multimodal AI workshop

Reading to learn 2022-01

CMU-LTI colloquium

Learning rare and new concepts in task-oriented dialogue systems 2019-04

Microsoft Research

Translating natural language questions to SQL queries 2018-05

Target Data Science

Codependent representation learning for question answering 2017-02

Stanford NLP group