CV
Education, experience, publications, and awards. Last updated 2026-04.
Contact Information
| Name | Zhen Wan |
| Professional Title | PhD Student · Kyoto University |
| zhenwan.nlp@gmail.com | |
| Location | , Kyoto, 606-8501 |
Professional Summary
PhD student in Informatics (Intelligence Science & Technology) at Kyoto University and Research Intern at NVIDIA Research. Research on voice agentic systems, multimodal LLMs, and low-resource Japanese NLP.
Experience
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2025 - Present Remote, Japan
Research Intern
NVIDIA Research
Working on NVIDIA’s Omni models on the speech side — agentic ASR, speech translation, TTS, and evaluation.
- Developed a novel agent-based intelligence-quotient evaluation for speech LLMs and cascaded pipelines that outperforms existing metrics in aligning with human preference (SpeechIQ, ACL 2025 Main).
- Introduced a voice-agentic framework that teaches an omni-model when to trust itself versus when to consult external audio perception (Speech-Hands, ACL 2026 Oral).
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2023 - 2024 Japan
Research Assistant
LLM-jp
Japanese instruction data via GPT-4 self-instruction and an automatic evaluation benchmark for Japanese LLMs.
- Co-led the ja-vicuna-qa-benchmark project.
- Co-first-authored LREC-COLING 2024 paper on rapid Japanese instruction data + benchmark construction.
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2023 - 2025 Japan
Research Assistant
SIP — Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program
Continually pre-trained general Japanese LLMs on Japanese medical domain corpus and instruction-tuned on Japanese medical tasks.
- Built the training framework + open tutorial for Megatron-LM parallel training on MDX Cloud.
- Two EMNLP 2025 papers (Main + Findings) on Japanese medical LLMs.
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2024 - Present Japan
Research Fellow (DC2)
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS)
DC2 fellowship on Multi-document and Multi-modal Information Extraction (acceptance rate 19.1%).
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2023 - 2023 Hangzhou, China
Research Intern
Alibaba DAMO Academy
Data selection and training curriculum for continually pre-training and instruction-tuning Chinese Legal LLMs.
- Built a multi-step retrieval-augmented system for robust, updated legal QA.
- 1st-authored ACL 2024 Findings paper on Adapt-Retrieve-Revise for Chinese Legal LLMs.
Education
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2023 - Present Kyoto, Japan
PhD Candidate
Kyoto University
Informatics (Intelligence Science & Technology)
- Advised by Prof. Sadao Kurohashi and Prof. Chenhui Chu.
- JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientists (DC2).
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2021 - 2023 Kyoto, Japan
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2014 - 2018 Hangzhou, China
Awards
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ACL 2025 Best Industrial Paper Honor Mention
For NeKo (4th author) — task-guided mixture-of-experts for cross-modality post-recognition error correction.
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JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientists (DC2)
Acceptance rate 19.1%. Multi-document and Multi-modal Information Extraction.
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University Fellowship in Informatics, Kyoto University
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3rd Prize, College Industrial Design Competition
Languages
Chinese : Native
English : Fluent (TOEFL 100/120)
Japanese : Conversational (JLPT N2)
Skills
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