Zhaowei (James) Wang

E-mail: zwanggy # cse dot ust dot hk

2021_Aug.jpg

I am currently a research intern with the Seed VLM team at ByteDance, working on multimodal long-context capabilities for Seed-VL models with 128K and 1M-token contexts. This line of work also covers agentic long-context settings, where models are stress-tested on long-horizon, tool-augmented tasks requiring persistent multimodal memory and reasoning.

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.


My current research focuses on multimodal long-context modeling and agentic long-context settings for large vision-language models. I have worked on several related projects, including MMLongBench, MemLens, MMProLong, MMRetHeads, and Memory-T1.


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

Research Highlights

Multimodal Long Context
  1. arXiv
    Can Retrieval Heads See Images? Multimodal Retrieval Heads in Long-Context Vision-Language Models (MMRetHeads)
  2. arXiv
    Training Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively with Generalization Beyond 128K Context (MMProLong)
  3. 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. ICLR
    Memory-T1: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Reasoning in Multi-session Agents
  2. arXiv
    MEMLENS: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Memory in Large Vision-Language Models
  3. arXiv
    Rethinking Memory in AI: Taxonomy, Operations, Topics, and Future Directions

News

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.
May 15, 2025 Two papers on entailment and factual knowledge have been accepted by ACL2025.
Dec 1, 2024 One paper on entailment has been accepted by NAACL2025.

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