Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 01/08/20261/ Two papers from our lab were accepted to COLM this year: LakeQuest, led by Michael Solodko, and AgentIR, led by Zijian Chen. A bit about each below. 110
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 03/06/2026📣 I am hiring postdoctoral fellows in agentic AI at the R2L Lab @uwcheritoncs.bsky.social Lead your own agenda - systems that read, reason & act. Top-venue publishing, substantial compute, weekly PI 1:1s, and a real path to faculty/industry. Apply 👉 academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/32140academicjobsonline.orgUniversity of Waterloo, R2L Lab at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton Department of Computer Science Job #AJO32140, Postdoctoral Fellows in ML — Agents that Read, Reason, and Act, R2L Lab at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontar... 032
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 23/05/2026I helping recalibrate Waterloo’s software engineering program (and to some degree CS) for the age of AI. I wrote an essay on the challenges I’m seeing. www.victorzhong.com/writing/the-...victorzhong.comThe Homogenization of Computer Science - Victor Zhong 0162
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 19/04/2026R2L Lab will be at #ICLR2026! Check out Arthur Chen's grounded adaptation of agents post deployment, and Sitao Cheng's study of compositional generalization through RL! I'll also be there, please email to meet. arxiv.org/abs/2511.04847 arxiv.org/abs/2512.01970arxiv.orgTest-Time Adaptation for LLM Agents via Environment InteractionLarge language model (LLM)-based agents struggle to generalize to novel and complex environments, such as unseen websites or new sets of functions, due to a fundamental mismatch between their pre-trai... 010
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 10/04/2026I spent the last week going ham on coding agents. I feel like they are much more powerful than using web apps because CLI agents are much more customizable and can spawn subprocesses. 100
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 27/09/2025I will be at the IVADO agents workshop followed by COLM in Montreal. Please email me if you would like to meet. R2L Lab will be looking for 1-2 graduate students in 2026! 010
Reposted by Victor ZhongDan Jurafsky @jurafsky.bsky.social · 24/08/2025Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...web.stanford.eduSpeech and Language ProcessingSpeech and Language Processing 315358
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 21/08/2025I finally finished it! www.victorzhong.com/writing/refl...victorzhong.comReflections of a First-year Assistant Professor - Victor Zhong 0192
Reposted by Victor ZhongIVADO @ivado.bsky.social · 19/08/2025We would like to extend our warmest thanks to the organizing committee @sivareddyg.bsky.social, Dawn Song, @yoshuabengio.bsky.social, Alane Suhr, @chrisjpal.bsky.social, @yusu-agent.bsky.social and @vzhong.bsky.social. 121
Reposted by Victor ZhongEdward Grefenstette @egrefen.bsky.social · 21/07/2025Do you have a PhD (or equivalent) or will have one in the coming months (i.e. 2-3 months away from graduating)? Do you want to help build open-ended agents that help humans do humans things better, rather than replace them? We're hiring 1-2 Research Scientists! Check the 🧵👇 3196
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 02/07/2025I think in retrospect ARR might have been a bad idea. Am I hallucinating or is there an exodus of junior NLP researchers from *ACL into ML conferences and COLM? 000
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 18/06/2025Are you an established professor in AI open to moving to the University of Waterloo? Please DM me directly! 100
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 16/05/2025Flying out of DCA for the first time and I gotta say - this has ought to be one of the worst airports in North America… so cramped people are literally sitting on the ground or standing shoulder to shoulder 010
Reposted by Victor ZhongEliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · 16/05/2025This is how digital feudalism works. It offers the illusion of empowerment. Likes become validation. Followers feel like influence. Monetisation looks like success. But the rules are hidden. The platform decides what rises and what vanishes. 110922
Reposted by Victor ZhongDylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · 03/05/2025Is Best-of-N really the best we can do for language model inference? New paper (appearing at ICML) led by the amazing Audrey Huang (ahahaudrey.bsky.social) with Adam Block, Qinghua Liu, Nan Jiang, and Akshay Krishnamurthy (akshaykr.bsky.social). 1/11 1215
Reposted by Victor ZhongComputerUseAgents Workshop @workshopcua.bsky.social · 31/03/2025Incredible lineup of speakers at #CUA #WORKSHOP @ #ICML2025! Speakers part 3/3: Qingyun Wu (Penn State University) @qingyunwu.bsky.social Zhiyong Wu (Shanghai AI Lab) Victor Zhong (University of Waterloo, Vector Institute) @vzhong.bsky.social 021
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 27/03/2025Teaching for the first time: I finished the last official lecture of the class and got a surprise round of applause! Feels so great! 081
Reposted by Victor ZhongConference on Language Modeling @colmweb.org · 20/03/2025A bit of a mess around the conflict of COLM with the ARR (and to lesser degree ICML) reviews release. We feel this is creating a lot of pressure and uncertainty. So, we are pushing our deadlines: Abstracts due March 22 AoE (+48hr) Full papers due March 28 AoE (+24hr) Plz RT 🙏 33631
Reposted by Victor ZhongThomas Wolf @thomwolf.bsky.social · 12/03/2025We've kept pushing our Open-R1 project, an open initiative to replicate and extend the techniques behind DeepSeek-R1 And even we were mind-blown by the results we got with this latest model we're releasing: ⚡️OlympicCoder [1/3] 39918
Reposted by Victor Zhongwaterloosci @waterloosci.bsky.social · 08/03/2025#InternationalWomensDay is a time to promote women’s equity by celebrating women’s achievements, raising awareness about discrimination and taking action to forge gender parity. Meet some of the exceptional women in Science who are helping to #AccelerateAction: bit.ly/3XCAft9 @uwaterloo.ca 074
Reposted by Victor ZhongThe Beaverton @thebeaverton.com · 21/02/2025Report: CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! 1567772985
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 28/01/2025The democratization and commoditization of foundation models is happening and will continue to happen - regulation will not slow nor stop it. Secrecy, propriety moats, and trade embargoes may succeed briefly in AI, but they will fail. And when they do, they will likely fail hard. 040
Reposted by Victor ZhongWaterloo's David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science @uwcheritoncs.bsky.social · 20/01/2025📣 Big news for sustainability in tech! 🔋 CS Professor Martin Karsten and his collaborators Peter Cai and Joe Damato have developed a small modification to the Linux kernel — now part of Linux 6.13 — that could cut energy use in data centres by up to 30%. cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/cherito... 093
Reposted by Victor ZhongAllen School @uwcse.bsky.social · 08/01/2025#AI hallucinations are a problem; #UWAllen Ph.D. student @akariasai.bsky.social may have the answer. She was named a @techreviewjp.bsky.social Innovator Under 35 for her work to make #LLMs more transparent and useful—without making stuff up. #IU35 #AIforGood news.cs.washington.edu/2025/01/07/w...news.cs.washington.edu‘Working to solve global problems’: Allen School Ph.D. student Akari Asai named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan - Allen School NewsDespite their growing potential and increasing popularity, large language models (LLMs) often produce responses that are factually inaccurate or nonsensical, also known as hallucinations. Allen School... 0173
Reposted by Victor ZhongStephanie Chan @scychan.bsky.social · 04/01/2025Sadly, we have lost a brilliant researcher and colleague, Felix Hill. Please see this note, where I have tried to compile some of his writings: docs.google.com/document/d/1...docs.google.comFor FelixDevastatingly, we have lost a bright light in our field. Felix Hill was not only a deeply insightful thinker -- he was also a generous, thoughtful mentor to many researchers. He majorly changed my lif... 0161
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 04/01/2025Shoutout to the Pearson Air Canada lost+found folks.. Got in exhausted after a ~24 hour journey and realized at 11pm that I forgot my laptop in seat stowage. Filed a claim 11pm and received found notice 5am. Bussed to airport and recovered at 8am. Would have lost my lecture notes and talk slides! 150
Reposted by Victor Zhongkyunghyuncho.bsky.social @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social · 02/01/2025bye, felix kyunghyuncho.me/bye-felix/kyunghyuncho.meBye, Felix – Kyunghyun Cho 0926
Reposted by Victor ZhongYoav Artzi @yoavartzi.com · 02/01/2025Terrible tragedy. Douwe posted this on X: x.com/douwekiela/s... With a link and details about the service London: > his family have asked to share this webpage for the celebration of his life: pp.events/felixx.comx.com 0179
Reposted by Victor Zhongprofvlilienfeld.bsky.social @profvlilienfeld.bsky.social · 20/12/2024Faculty position doing AI for materials discovery! Come join us at the @uoftmse @uoft.bsky.social jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-... Plenty of exciting opportunities in the GTA and with @acceleration_c and @vectorinst.bsky.social in particular! Please share and retweet!jobs.utoronto.caAssistant Professor - AI Materials DiscoveryAssistant Professor - AI Materials Discovery 12719
Reposted by Victor Zhongkyunghyuncho.bsky.social @kyunghyuncho.bsky.social · 21/12/2024feeling a but under the weather this week … thus an increased level of activity on social media and blog: kyunghyuncho.me/i-sensed-anx...kyunghyuncho.mei sensed anxiety and frustration at NeurIPS’24 – Kyunghyun Cho 1917836
Reposted by Victor ZhongJeremy Howard @howard.fm · 19/12/2024I'll get straight to the point. We trained 2 new models. Like BERT, but modern. ModernBERT. Not some hypey GenAI thing, but a proper workhorse model, for retrieval, classification, etc. Real practical stuff. It's much faster, more accurate, longer context, and more useful. 🧵 19620147
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 11/12/2024Are you on the faculty market for data systems, ML, or CV? We have 6 (SIX!) spots at UWaterloo CS. If you are at NeurIPS please reach out - I'd love to talk to you! 082
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 08/12/2024I will be at NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver Dec 9-13. Please let me know if you'd like to learn more about r2llab.com or discuss potential collaborations. We will present 3 works around evaluating and building general-purpose language agents: 291
Reposted by Victor ZhongTim Rocktäschel @handle.invalid · 04/12/2024Excited to reveal Genie 2, our most capable foundation world model that, given a single prompt image, can generate an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D worlds. Fantastic cross-team effort by the Open-Endedness Team and many other teams at Google DeepMind! 🧞 39719
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 05/12/2024I will be in Vancouver for NeurIPS Dec 9-13. Please let me know if you’d like to catch up! 030
Reposted by Victor ZhongAkari Asai @akariasai.bsky.social · 04/12/2024I’m on the academic job market this year! I’m completing my @uwcse.bsky.social @uwnlp.bsky.social Ph.D. (2025), focusing on overcoming LLM limitations like hallucinations, by building new LMs. My Ph.D. work focuses on Retrieval-Augmented LMs to create more reliable AI systems 🧵 37117
Reposted by Victor ZhongSam Bowman @sleepinyourhat.bsky.social · 02/12/2024If you're potentially interested in transitioning into AI safety research, come collaborate with my team at Anthropic! Funded fellows program for researchers new to the field here: alignment.anthropic.com/2024/anthrop...alignment.anthropic.comIntroducing the Anthropic Fellows Program 37316
Reposted by Victor ZhongVictor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 18/11/2024If you are interested in applying to grad school in ML/NLP, and are interested in our work in feedback learning, semantic evaluation, and test-time adaptation, please consider applying at r2llab.com/opening. DDL Dec 1! I'll also be presenting recent works on language agents at NeurIPS in Vancouver. 102
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 23/11/2024Are you on the job market? Our department at the University of Waterloo is hiring for multiple tenure track positions in CS, please apply here! Feel free to DM me with questions. cs.uwaterloo.ca/tenure-track...cs.uwaterloo.caTenure-track Faculty Positions | Cheriton School of Computer ScienceTenure-track Faculty Positions ad 0216
Reposted by Victor ZhongAkari Asai @akariasai.bsky.social · 19/11/20241/ Introducing ᴏᴘᴇɴꜱᴄʜᴏʟᴀʀ: a retrieval-augmented LM to help scientists synthesize knowledge 📚 @uwnlp.bsky.social & Ai2 With open models & 45M-paper datastores, it outperforms proprietary systems & match human experts. Try out our demo! openscholar.allen.ai 616339
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 18/11/2024If you are interested in applying to grad school in ML/NLP, and are interested in our work in feedback learning, semantic evaluation, and test-time adaptation, please consider applying at r2llab.com/opening. DDL Dec 1! I'll also be presenting recent works on language agents at NeurIPS in Vancouver. 102
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 18/11/2024Hi Bluesky! I am a assistant professor at the University of Waterloo. My lab r2llab.com explores how to improve ML efficiency and generalization using language understanding. I am not super active on social media, but do post occasionally to share our work. Here's what we work on 🧵r2llab.comReading to Learn Lab at the University of Waterloo 140
Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 13/11/2024Well hello #machinelearning #nlp! Certainly seems like there is a very noticeable migration from X recently! 010