Welcome to My Homepage

I received my M.Sc. in Computer Science from Western University under the supervision of Prof. Pingzhao Hu.

During my M.Sc., I published three first-author papers at NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML on structure-grounded multimodal reasoning.

My research interests lie in LLM Post-Training, Multimodal Reasoning, World Models，and Agents. [See My CV Here]

📝 Selected Publications

🎓 Top-Tier Conferences During My Master’s

ICML 2026

Can LLMs Reason Over Complex Structures Without Wasting Tokens?

Scaling-Aware Adapter for Structure-Grounded LLM Reasoning [Code]

Zihao Jing, Qiuhao Zeng, Ruiyi Fang, Yan Yi Li, Yan Sun, Boyu Wang, Pingzhao Hu

Designed an entropy-guided smart adapter that focuses on the instruction-related parts of 3D entities, solving the longstanding gap of LLMs treating all positions as equally important. Achieves top-1 on 17 out of 18 biology QA benchmarks, making LLM-assisted structural research an operational reality.

ICLR 2026

How Can LLMs Align With Structures Without Fixed-Size Bottlenecks?

Entropy-Guided Dynamic Tokens for Graph-LLM Alignment in Molecular Understanding [Code] [Video]

Zihao Jing, Qiuhao Zeng, Ruiyi Fang, Yan Sun, Boyu Wang, Pingzhao Hu

A dynamic connector that scales representation slots based on complexity, bridging the gap of fixed-size connectors that lose structural detail for large entities. The model ranks #1 on 20 of 21 understanding tasks and trains 3.5× faster under equivalent settings, directly advancing AI-driven drug design.

NeurIPS 2025

Can Foundation Models Learn Reliable Representations from Noisy Structures?

Structure-Aware Fusion with Progressive Injection for Multimodal Molecular Representation Learning [Code] [Video&Poster]

Zihao Jing, Yan Sun, Yan Yi Li, Sugitha Janarthanan, Alana Deng, Pingzhao Hu

Built a multimodal encoder that first stabilizes noisy 3D shape data into a reliable prior, solving the longstanding instability in multimodal embeddings that incorporate 3D geometry. Ranks #1 on 22/29 molecular property benchmarks with up to 27% better accuracy, and was applied to a pipeline for finding Pin1 inhibitors in cancer treatment.

🎓 Additional Work and Co-authored Publications

• Junqin Huang, Zhongjie Hu, Zihao Jing, Mengya Gao, Yichao Wu. Piccolo2: General Text Embedding with Multi-Task Hybrid Loss Training. SenseTime Technical Report, 2024.

• Zihao Jing, Yuxi Long, Ganlin Feng. Pruning for Generalization: A Transfer-Oriented Spatiotemporal Graph Framework. Preprint.

• Qiuhao Zeng, Jerry Huang, Peng Lu, Ruiyi Fang, Gezheng Xu, Zihao Jing, Yufei Cui, Charles Ling, Gang Niu, Boyu Wang. Attention with Routed-Memory for Learnable Sparse Control. ICML 2026.

• Ruiyi Fang, Jingyu Zhao, Shuo Wang, Ruizhi Pu, Bingheng Li, Jiale Cai, Zhihao Li, Zihao Jing, Jian Zhu, Song Tang, et al. SAGA: Structural Aggregation Guided Alignment with Dynamic View and Neighborhood Order Selection for Multiview Graph Domain Adaptation. ICLR 2026.

• Alana Deng, Sugitha Janarthanan, Yan Sun, Zihao Jing, Pingzhao Hu. Distilling and Adapting: A Topology-Aware Framework for Zero-Shot Interaction Prediction in Multiplex Biological Networks. ICLR 2026.

For a complete list of publications, see my Google Scholar.

📄 Research Funding and Grant Contributions

Nvidia Academic Grant Program 2025

Alliance (Computing Canada) RRG Grant

Received 25 RGU-years (Reference GPU Unit-Years, equivalent to 5×A100-80GB GPU-years) on Canada’s national supercomputing cluster for our lab via the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, Resources for Research Groups 2026 grant; estimated commercial rental value: ~US$80K.

📖 Education

• 2024.09 - 2026.06, MSc of Computer Science, Western University. London, Canada. Supervised by Prof. Pingzhao Hu.
• 2019.09 - 2024.06, BEng, Software Engineering, Beihang University. Beijing, China. Graduated with Honors.

💻 Internships

SenseTime

SenseTime - LLM Research Intern | 2023.09–2024.06

• Developed Piccolo-GPT, a dual-function LLM supporting both text embedding and generation within a single architecture.
• Trained general-purpose text embedding models (Piccolo2); top-1 on C-MTEB (May 2024).
• Fine-tuned a ~100B LLM for vertical livestream marketing for Sina Weibo.

Jina AI

Jina AI - AI Research Intern | 2023.04–2023.09

• Implemented LLM-based denoising and sentiment analysis pipeline for Budweiser; reduced cost >13%.
• Led evaluation and deploying of super-resolution models for commercialization.
• Contributed to RunGPT of LlamaIndex with our super-resolution pipeline.

🎤 Selected Talks

Demystifying LLMs, From Pretraining to Adaptation, UWORCS 2025

Advanced Attention Mechanism, UWO Seminar

DeepSeek-Advanced Reinforcement Learning Approaches, UWO Seminar

AlphaFold and All-Atom Foundation Models, UWO BioSeminar

👁 Academic Service

Conference Reviewer ICML 2026 (6 papers) 🏅 Gold Reviewer Award

Conference Reviewer ICLR 2026 (5 papers)

Conference Reviewer NeurIPS 2026

Workshop Reviewer TSALM @ ICLR 2026; AI4GOOD, FMSD, GFM @ ICML 2026

Journal Reviewer ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)

Journal Reviewer IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)

Conference Volunteer NeurIPS 2025, San Diego

🧑‍🏫 Mentorship

Teaching Assistant, COMPSCI 2211 Software Tools and Systems Programming  | Fall 2024 and Fall 2025

Teaching Assistant, COMPSCI 3305 Operating Systems  | Winter 2025 and Winter 2026

Mentored junior students on operating systems, software tools, Linux workflows, and research coding practices.

📈 Technical Skills

• Research: LLM Post-Training, Pre-Training / Fine-Tuning, Multimodal Alignment.
• Systems & Programming: Linux, Slurm, Docker, HPC Workflows, Python, C/C++, Java, SQL.
• ML Engineering: PyTorch, Transformers (HuggingFace), DeepSpeed, DDP/FSDP, Multi-GPU/Multi-Node Training.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2023 Silver Prize of Feng Ru Cup Science and Innovation Competition (University-level).
• 2021 Third Prize, 13th National Undergraduate Mathematics Competition (National-level).
• 2021 Third Prize, 32nd Beijing Undergraduate Mathematics Competition (Province-level).
• 2021 Outstanding Student Leader Award (University-Level).
• 2021 Third Prize in Physics Academic Competition (University-Level).
• 2020 H Prize in the Mathematical Contest In Modeling.

👨‍🏫 Research Values from My Mentors

• Prof. Pingzhao Hu, Western University:   “Write a paper such that reviewers neither can nor need to ask questions.”
• Prof. Boyu Wang, Western University:   “Read 20+ related papers before discussing ideas with me.”
• Yifu Ding, PhD in CS, Beihang University:   “A paper should present clear, well-aligned challenges and novelties.”
• Qiuhao Zeng, Postdoc in CS, University of Toronto:   “If you dig one direction deeper, you will always uncover novelty.”