CV

Education, experience, publications, and awards. Last updated 2026-04.

Contact Information

Name Zhen Wan
Professional Title PhD Student · Kyoto University
Email 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

  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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%).
  • 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

  • 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).
  • 2021 - 2023

    Kyoto, Japan

    MS
    Kyoto University
    Informatics (Intelligence Science & Technology)
  • 2014 - 2018

    Hangzhou, China

    B.E.
    Zhejiang University
    Energy Engineering

Awards

  • ACL 2025 Best Industrial Paper Honor Mention

    For NeKo (4th author) — task-guided mixture-of-experts for cross-modality post-recognition error correction.

  • JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientists (DC2)

    Acceptance rate 19.1%. Multi-document and Multi-modal Information Extraction.

  • University Fellowship in Informatics, Kyoto University
  • 3rd Prize, College Industrial Design Competition

Languages

Chinese : Native
English : Fluent (TOEFL 100/120)
Japanese : Conversational (JLPT N2)

Skills

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