I am an AI researcher specializing in natural language processing and large language models. I received my PhD in Computer Science from Rutgers University in October 2025, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Karl Stratos. I previously earned an M.S. in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 2021 and a B.S. in Applied Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2019.

Current Research Interests

• Large Language Model Reasoning
• Retrieval- and Memory- Augmented Generation

Publications

• ReNCE: Learning to Reason by Noise Contrastive Estimation
  Wenzheng Zhang, Karl Stratos.
  Preprint 2026 (In Submission).

• ImpRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Implicit Queries
  Wenzheng Zhang, Xi Victoria Lin, Karl Stratos, Wen-tau Yih, Mingda Chen.
  Findings of EMNLP 2025.

• Seq2seq is All You Need for Coreference Resolution
  Wenzheng Zhang, Sam Wiseman, Karl Stratos.
  EMNLP 2023. [code]

• Improving Multitask Retrieval by Promoting Task Specialization
  Wenzheng Zhang, Chenyan Xiong, Karl Stratos, Arnold Overwijk.
  TACL 2023.[code]

• EntQA: Entity Linking as Question Answering
  Wenzheng Zhang, Wenyue Hua, Karl Stratos.
  ICLR 2022 Spotlight .[code]

• Understanding Hard Negatives in Noise Contrastive Estimation
  Wenzheng Zhang, Karl Stratos.
  NAACL 2021.[code]

Experiences

• Research Intern at Meta FAIR, May 2024 – Dec 2024
  Worked with Dr. Mingda Chen, Dr. Scott Yih and Dr. Victoria Lin on query-free RAG.

• Research Intern at Microsoft, Jun 2022 – Sep 2022
  Worked with Prof. Chenyan Xiong and Arnold Overwijk on multi-task retrieval.