Zilong Wang

I am a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where I work on agentic coding for Gemini, with a focus on cybersecurity and software engineering tasks. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC San Diego in 2025, advised by Professor Jingbo Shang. Before UCSD, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University in 2020, where I was fortunate to be advised by Professor Xiaojun Wan.

I am broadly interested in agentic RL, coding LLMs, and data synthesis for training capable language model agents. If you'd like to discuss research — or just chat — feel free to connect zlwang.ucsd [at] gmail [dot] com.

X / GitHub / Scholar / LinkedIn

Education

Ph.D.	Sep. 2020 – Apr. 2025 University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California Ph.D. in Computer Science
B.S.	Sep. 2016 – Jun. 2020 Peking University, Beijing, China B.S. in Computer Science

Selected Publications [full list]

TACL 2026	Learning to Optimize Multi-objective Alignment through Dynamic Reward Weighting Yining Lu, Zilong Wang, Shiyang Li, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Qingyu Yin, Zhan Shi, Zixuan Zhang, Meng Jiang ( corresponding author) / arXiv / code
NeurIPS 2025	Training Language Models to Generate Quality Code with Program Analysis Feedback Feng Yao, Zilong Wang, Liyuan Liu, Junxia Cui, Li Zhong, Xiaohan Fu, Haohui Mai, Vish Krishnan, Jianfeng Gao, Jingbo Shang (* equal contribution) / arXiv / code
COLM 2025	RRO: LLM Agent Optimization Through Rising Reward Trajectories Zilong Wang, Jingfeng Yang, Sreyashi Nag, Samarth Varshney, Xianfeng Tang, Haoming Jiang, Jingbo Shang, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar / arXiv
ACL 2024	Debug like a Human: A Large Language Model Debugger via Verifying Runtime Execution Step-by-step Li Zhong, Zilong Wang, Jingbo Shang / arXiv / code / featured: MarkTechPost / talk: BAAI / sota: HumanEval 98.2%
ICLR 2024	Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding Zilong Wang, Hao Zhang, Chun-Liang Li, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Vincent Perot, Zifeng Wang, Lesly Miculicich, Yasuhisa Fujii, Jingbo Shang, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister / arXiv / code / featured: Google Research Blog
AAAI 2024	Can ChatGPT replace StackOverflow? A Study on Robustness and Reliability of Large Language Model Code Generation Li Zhong, Zilong Wang / arXiv / code / featured: TheRegister

Experiences

2025 – Present, Google DeepMind, Mountain View, California
Research Scientist. Working on agentic coding for Gemini with a focus on cybersecurity. See CodeMender.

2025, Amazon, Palo Alto, California
Applied Scientist. Worked on long-horizon RL for mathematical reasoning and agentic RL for LLMs. See Learning to Optimize Multi-objective Alignment through Dynamic Reward Weighting.

2022 - 2024, Google Research, Mountain View & Sunnyvale, California
Research Intern. Worked on table understanding agents and multimodal LMs for document AI. See Chain-of-Table and LMDX.

2021, Adobe Research, San Jose, California
Research Intern. Worked on multimodal LMs for document image understanding. See MGDoc.

2020 – 2021, Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China
Research Intern. Worked on pre-training for reading order detection in document understanding. See LayoutReader.

Last updated: May 2026