Zhaowei (James) Wang

E-mail: zwanggy # cse dot ust dot hk

I am pursuing my PhD in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at HKUST, supervised by Yangqiu Song, as a recipient of the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS). Previously, I was a visiting scholar at EdinburghNLP, working with Mark Steedman. I received my MPhil degree from HKUST CSE in August 2023.

I am currently a research intern with the Seed VLM team at ByteDance, contributing to Seed 1.8, 2.0, and 2.1. My research focuses on multimodal long context (128K–1M tokens; MMLongBench), cowork agent (OfficeQA, GDP.pdf), and chart and table understanding (CharXiv, Chartography). My academic projects include MMLongBench, MemLens, MMProLong, MMRetHeads, and Memory-T1. I also contribute to VLMEvalKit.

I am always open to new collaborations. Please feel free to reach out via email.

News

Oct 18, 2026 MMProLong has been accepted to NeurIPS 2026!
Oct 18, 2026 MMRetHeads has been accepted to EMNLP 2026!
Sep 19, 2025 MMLongBench is accepted as a spotlight at NeurIPS 2025!!!
Sep 19, 2025 Two papers are accepted at NeurIPS 2025!
Aug 20, 2025 Three papers accepted at EMNLP 2025.
Jun 9, 2025 The workshop version of our MMLongBench has been accepted by the LCFM Workshop at ICML 2025.
May 20, 2025 Our new paper about Multimodal Long Context is now available: MMLongBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively and Thoroughly.
May 16, 2025 Our new paper about LLM memory is now available: Rethinking Memory in AI: Taxonomy, Operations, Topics, and Future Directions.

Research Highlights

Multimodal Long Context
  1. Visual and textual needle retrieval after masking selected attention heads. EMNLP
    Can Retrieval Heads See Images? Multimodal Retrieval Heads in Long-Context Vision-Language Models (MMRetHeads)
    In The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
  2. MMProLong data construction, from segment sampling and question generation to full-document instances. NeurIPS
    Training Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively with Generalization Beyond 128K Context (MMProLong)
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
  3. MMLongBench comparison of document question answering and needle retrieval performance. NeurIPS
    MMLongBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively and Thoroughly (*spotlight)
    In The 39th (2025) Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Long-Term Memory
  1. Memory-T1 candidate generation and reinforcement learning framework. ICLR
    Memory-T1: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Reasoning in Multi-session Agents
  2. MemLens benchmark construction and multimodal conversation history. arXiv
    MEMLENS: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Memory in Large Vision-Language Models
  3. A taxonomy of memory operations, contextual memory and parametric memory. arXiv
    Rethinking Memory in AI: Taxonomy, Operations, Topics, and Future Directions

Selected Awards

Major Awards:
  • Hong Kong PhD Fellowship    2023
  • National Scholarship (top 2%)    2018-2019
  • National Scholarship (top 2%)    2017-2018
  • National Scholarship (top 2%)    2016-2017
Other Awards:
  • HKUST RedBird Academic Excellence Award for Continuing PhD Students    2025
  • HKUST Overseas Research Award    2025
  • HKUST RedBird PhD Award    2023-2024
  • Merit Student in Heilongjiang Province (top 2.5%)    2017-2018

Service

Area Chair: ACL ARR 2024 (all rounds); ACL ARR 2025 Feb, May, July

Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS 2024, 2025; ICLR 2025, 2026; ICML 2025; ICCV 2025; ACL 2023, 2024; EMNLP 2022, 2023; NAACL 2024; KDD 2023; SIGIR 2025; CIKM 2023; AAAI 2024; ACL ARR 2023 (all rounds); ACL ARR 2024 Feb, Apr; ACL ARR 2025 May; COLM 2024, 2025; EACL 2023, 2024; COLING 2022, 2025; LREC-COLING 2024; SDM 2023; AACL 2022, 2023; AKBC 2022; WiNLP@EMNLP 2024

External Journal Reviewer: JAIR 2023 Apr