Scaling Multi-Agent Intelligence with Substrate-Centric Coordination
Zhuokai Zhao
Staff AI Research Scientist, Meta AI
PhD in Computer Science, University of Chicago
PhD in Computer Science, University of Chicago
Biography
I am a Staff AI Research Scientist at Meta AI. I received my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Chicago, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yuxin Chen. Before that, I received my Master's degree in Robotics from Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Prof. Nassir Navab, and my Bachelor's degree with Honors in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worked on robotics with Prof. Seth Hutchinson.
My research focuses on developing novel training recipes, both data and algorithms, that enhance reasoning in (multimodal) large language models, as well as multi-agent systems that leverage them.
News
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COLM 2026 · SandMLE accepted.
Jul 2026
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ICML 2026 · Three papers accepted: FusionRoute, LILO, and DAG-MoE.
Apr 2026
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ACL 2026 · Mixture-of-Minds (Main) and TARo (Findings) accepted.
Apr 2026
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ICLR 2026 · DreamGym accepted.
Jan 2026
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AISTATS 2026 · RLMesh accepted.
Jan 2026
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NeurIPS 2025 · Four papers accepted: Thought Communication Spotlight, Dropout Decoding, S'MoRE, and MJ-Bench.
Sep 2025
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EMNLP 2025 · DISCO accepted.
Aug 2025
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COLM 2025 · SPOC accepted.
Jul 2025
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ICCV 2025 · RankCLIP and DyTo accepted.
Jun 2025
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CVPR 2025 · HumanMM accepted; ICoV accepted to the MAR Workshop Oral.
Feb 2025
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ICLR 2025 · SCYLLA accepted.
Jan 2025
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NeurIPS 2024 Workshops · DAO accepted to the BDU Workshop Oral; NERO accepted to the Interpretable AI Workshop.
Oct 2024
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CoRL 2024 · EscIRL accepted.
Sep 2024
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IROS 2024 · ACS accepted.
Jun 2024
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Joined Meta as a Research Scientist.
Jun 2024
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ICML 2024 · HALC accepted.
May 2024
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ICME 2024 · Multimodal Guidance Network accepted.
Apr 2024
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NAACL 2024 · AutoPRM accepted.
Mar 2024
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KDD 2023 · User-Centric Ranking accepted.
May 2023
Selected Publications
* co-first author · † joint last author
2026
SplitJEPA: Learning Invariant and Variant Latent Worlds without Reconstruction
Discovered, Not Designed: Population Evolution for Collaborative and Compute-Intensive Model Discovery
Mixture of Self-Improving Branches For Agent Harness Optimization
Rethinking Transfer in Continual Learning: A Replay-Based Realisation
Remember When It Matters: Proactive Memory Agent for Long-Horizon Agents
SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions
SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation
OmniOPD: Logit-Free On-Policy Distillation via Speculative Verification
Self-Policy Distillation via Capability-Selective Subspace Projection
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Decentralized Memory
Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute
TARo: Token-level Adaptive Routing for LLM Test-time Alignment
Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding
Synthetic Sandbox for Training Machine Learning Engineering Agents
CircuitProbe: Tracing Visual Temporal Evidence Flow in Video Language Models
Scaling Agent Learning via Experience Synthesis
2025
Exploring System 1 and 2 Communication for Latent Reasoning in LLMs
Let it Calm: Exploratory Annealed Decoding for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning
Thought Communication in Multiagent Collaboration
Enhancing Vision-Language Model Reliability with Uncertainty-Guided Dropout Decoding
StreamMem: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Memory for Streaming Video Understanding
RankCLIP: Ranking-Consistent Language-Image Pretraining
Beyond Training: Dynamic Token Merging for Zero-Shot Video Understanding
CAFe: Unifying Representation and Generation with Contrastive-Autoregressive Finetuning
Autonomous Multimodal Reasoning via Implicit Chain-of-Vision
Beyond Reward Hacking: Causal Rewards for Large Language Model Alignment
2024
Direct Acquisition Optimization for Low-Budget Active Learning
Evaluating Machine Learning Models with NERO: Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits
Preference Optimization with Multi-Sample Comparisons
Multimodal Guidance Network for Missing-Modality Inference in Content Moderation
PANDORA: Detailed LLM Jailbreaking via Collaborated Phishing Agents with Decomposed Reasoning
Safe Reinforcement Learning via Hierarchical Adaptive Chance-Constraint Safeguards
HALC: Object Hallucination Reduction via Adaptive Focal-Contrast Decoding
AutoPRM: Automating Procedural Supervision for Multi-Step Reasoning via Controllable Question Decomposition
2023
RELAX: Reinforcement Learning Enabled 2D-LiDAR Autonomous System for Parsimonious UAVs
Breaking the Curse of Quality Saturation with User-Centric Ranking
2020
System and Method for Assisted Patient Positioning
2026
Scaling Multi-Agent Intelligence with Substrate-Centric Coordination
SplitJEPA: Learning Invariant and Variant Latent Worlds without Reconstruction
Verify Less, Evolve More: Training Idea-Level Critics for Verification-Efficient ML Evolving Agents
Discovered, Not Designed: Population Evolution for Collaborative and Compute-Intensive Model Discovery
Mixture of Self-Improving Branches For Agent Harness Optimization
Knowledge Distillation During Mid-Training Favors Reasoning over Factual Recall
Shared Actors Need Not Share Critics: Effects of Value Mismatch in Parallel Reinforcement Learning
Rethinking Transfer in Continual Learning: A Replay-Based Realisation
SVR-R1: Bootstrapping Multi-modal Reasoning with Self-verification in Reinforcement Learning
Remember When It Matters: Proactive Memory Agent for Long-Horizon Agents
SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions
SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation
OmniOPD: Logit-Free On-Policy Distillation via Speculative Verification
Self-Policy Distillation via Capability-Selective Subspace Projection
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Decentralized Memory
Agentic Recommender System with Hierarchical Belief-State Memory
LILO: Bayesian Optimization with Interactive Natural Language Feedback
Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute
DAG-MoE: From Simple Mixture to Structural Aggregation in Mixture-of-Experts
TARo: Token-level Adaptive Routing for LLM Test-time Alignment
Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding
Synthetic Sandbox for Training Machine Learning Engineering Agents
LLM-Driven Reasoning for Constraint-Aware Feature Selection in Industrial Systems
CircuitProbe: Tracing Visual Temporal Evidence Flow in Video Language Models
Accelerating PDE Surrogates via RL-Guided Mesh Optimization
Scaling Agent Learning via Experience Synthesis
2025
Exploring System 1 and 2 Communication for Latent Reasoning in LLMs
Let it Calm: Exploratory Annealed Decoding for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning
Thought Communication in Multiagent Collaboration
S'MoRE: Structural Mixture of Residual Experts for LLM Fine-tuning
MJ-BENCH: Is Your Multimodal Reward Model Really a Good Judge for Text-to-Image Generation?
Enhancing Vision-Language Model Reliability with Uncertainty-Guided Dropout Decoding
RecoWorld: Building Simulated Environments for Agentic Recommender Systems
StreamMem: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Memory for Streaming Video Understanding
DISCO Balances the Scales: Adaptive Domain- and Difficulty-Aware Reinforcement Learning on Imbalanced Data
Boosting LLM Reasoning via Spontaneous Self-Correction
RankCLIP: Ranking-Consistent Language-Image Pretraining
Beyond Training: Dynamic Token Merging for Zero-Shot Video Understanding
Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueries
CAFe: Unifying Representation and Generation with Contrastive-Autoregressive Finetuning
HumanMM: Global Human Motion Recovery from Multi-shot Videos
Autonomous Multimodal Reasoning via Implicit Chain-of-Vision
Quantifying Generalization Complexity for Large Language Models
Beyond Reward Hacking: Causal Rewards for Large Language Model Alignment
2024
Direct Acquisition Optimization for Low-Budget Active Learning
Evaluating Machine Learning Models with NERO: Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits
EscIRL: Evolving Self-Contrastive IRL for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving
Preference Optimization with Multi-Sample Comparisons
Multimodal Guidance Network for Missing-Modality Inference in Content Moderation
PANDORA: Detailed LLM Jailbreaking via Collaborated Phishing Agents with Decomposed Reasoning
Safe Reinforcement Learning via Hierarchical Adaptive Chance-Constraint Safeguards
HALC: Object Hallucination Reduction via Adaptive Focal-Contrast Decoding
AutoPRM: Automating Procedural Supervision for Multi-Step Reasoning via Controllable Question Decomposition
2023
RELAX: Reinforcement Learning Enabled 2D-LiDAR Autonomous System for Parsimonious UAVs
Breaking the Curse of Quality Saturation with User-Centric Ranking
2020
Dissertations
Enhanced Data Utilization for Efficient and Trustworthy Deep Learning
Utilizing Both Past and Future: Multi-Frame Memory Based Network in Solving Particle Image Velocimetry
Other Projects
OpenChemistry/Stempy: Stable Version
Trajectory Planning and Control for Nonholonomic Robot Among Onstacles
Head-Mounted Display Integration for Orthopedic Surgery
Service
Area Chair
- Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)2026
Conference Reviewer
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)2025, 2026
- Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)2023–2025
- International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)2023–2026
- International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)2025
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)2025, 2026
- Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)2025
- International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)2025, 2026
- SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)2024
- Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)2023, 2024
- International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)2024
- International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)2024
- ACM Multimedia (ACM MM)2024
- SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM)2024
- IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)2023–2025
- IEEE Visualization Conference (IEEE VIS)2023
- International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)2023
Journal Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)2025
- IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)2023
- Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)2023