Shimao Zhang (张世茂)

PhD Student Department of Computer Science and Technology Tsinghua University 30 Shuangqing Street, Haidian District Beijing 100084, China E-mail: smzhang@smail.nju.edu.cn

About me

I'm now an incoming PhD student of CoAI Group at Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Minlie Huang. I have received my B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree at School of Computer Science of Nanjing University. I was a master student of NJU NLP Group, advised by Prof. Shujian Huang.

I have finished a period of unforgettable time in LAMDA Group supervised by Prof. Lijun Zhang during my undergraduate years. And I was a research intern at NU MLL Lab in Northwestern University in the summer of 2025, advised by Prof. Manling Li.

And I was a research intern in Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) (work with Dr. Yeyun Gong, Dr. Xiao Liu), Ant Research (work with Dr. Jian Guan) and Meituan M17 Foundation Model Group.

If you are interested in cooperating with me, please feel free to reach out to me.

Research Interests

My current research interests include:

• Large Language Models (LLMs)

• Multimodality

• Reasoning

• Interpretability

Publications

* Equal Contribution   ^† Corresponding Author

• How does Alignment Enhance LLMs' Multilingual Capabilities? A Language Neurons Perspective

  Shimao Zhang*, Zhejian Lai*, Xiang Liu*, Shuaijie She, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Shujian Huang^†, and Jiajun Chen

  AAAI 2026 (Oral Presentation)

  [arXiv] [Code]

• Process-based Self-Rewarding Language Models

  Shimao Zhang, Xiao Liu^†, Xin Zhang, Junxiao Liu, Zheheng Luo, Shujian Huang^†, and Yeyun Gong

  ACL 2025 - Findings

  [arXiv] [Code]

• Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners

  Shimao Zhang, Changjiang Gao, Wenhao Zhu, Jiajun Chen, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, and Shujian Huang^†

  EMNLP 2024 (Oral Presentation)

  [arXiv] [Code]

• Distributed Projection-free Online Learning for Smooth and Convex Losses

  Yibo Wang*, Yuanyu Wan*, Shimao Zhang, and Lijun Zhang^†

  AAAI 2023 (Oral Presentation)

  [PDF] [Bibtex]

• EDT: Improving Large Language Models' Generation by Entropy-based Dynamic Temperature Sampling

  Shimao Zhang, Yu Bao, and Shujian Huang^†

  arXiv:2403.14541

  [arXiv]

• PATS: Process-Level Adaptive Thinking Mode Switching

  Yi Wang*, Junxiao Liu*, Shimao Zhang*, Jiajun Chen, and Shujian Huang^†

  arXiv:2505.19250

  [arXiv] [Code]

More information of publications in Google Scholar.

Awards & Honors

• Outstanding Graduate, Nanjing University, 2026

• First-class Academic Scholarship, Nanjing University, 2023, 2024, 2025

• Huatai Securities Technology Scholarship, Nanjing University, 2025

• Outstanding Graduate Student, Nanjing University, 2024, 2025(pacesetter)

• BYD Scholarship, Nanjing University, 2024

• People's Scholarship, Nanjing University, 2021, 2022

• First Prize, The 34th National High School Mathematics League, Chinese Mathematical Society, 2018

Last Updated 2026-06-24