Victor Zhong
About
Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair – 2024
Victor Zhong is an Assistant Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science of the University of Waterloo, and a Faculty Member at Vector Institute.
Zhong’s research is at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning, and aims to teach machines to read natural language specifications to generalize to new problems. His work spans interactive learning, robotics, semantic parsing and conversation agents. His recent work includes AI systems that generalize to new environments by reading manuals, automated curriculum learning from language, and automatically generating reward functions from language for robotic control.
Awards
- Apple Scholar in AI/ML, Apple, 2021
- Outstanding Paper Award, EMNLP, 2017
Relevant Publications
- Xie, T., Zhang, D., Chen, J., Li, X., Zhao, S., Cao, R., Hua, T. J., Cheng, Z., Shin, D., Lei, F., Liu, Y., Xu, Y., Zhou, S., Savarese, S., Xiong, C., Zhong, V., & Yu, T. (2024). OSWorld: Benchmarking multimodal agents for open-ended tasks in real computer environments. ArXiv, 2404.07972.
- Zhong, V., Misra, D., Yuan, X., & Côté, M.-A. (2024). Policy Improvement using Language Feedback Models. ArXiv, 2402.07876.
- Xie, T., Zhao, S., Wu, C. H., Liu, Y., Luo, Q., Zhong, V., Yang, Y., & Yu, T. (2024). Text2Reward: Reward shaping with language models for reinforcement learning. In International Conference on Learning Representation.
- Zhong, V., Lewis, M., Wang, S. I., & Zettlemoyer, L. (2020). Grounded Adaptation for zero-shot Executable Semantic Parsing. In Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
- Zhong, V., Rocktäschel, T., & Grefenstette, E. (2020). RTFM: Generalising to novel environment dynamics via reading. In International Conference on Learning Representation.