Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Victor Zhong

@vzhong.bsky.social

630 followers 150 following 31 posts

Assistant Prof at University of Waterloo, CIFAR AI Chair at Vector Institute. Formerly UWNLP, Stanford NLP, MSR, FAIR, Google Brain, Salesforce Research via MetaMind #machinelearning, #nlp victorzhong.com

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Nov 18

Hi Bluesky! I am a assistant professor at the University of Waterloo. My lab r2llab.com explores how to improve ML efficiency and generalization using language understanding. I am not super active on social media, but do post occasionally to share our work. Here's what we work on 🧵

Reading to Learn Lab at the University of Waterloo

r2llab.com

1 4

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · 12d

I will be at the IVADO agents workshop followed by COLM in Montreal. Please email me if you would like to meet. R2L Lab will be looking for 1-2 graduate students in 2026!

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Dan Jurafsky @jurafsky.bsky.social · Aug 24

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

Speech and Language Processing

web.stanford.edu

2 59 150

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Aug 21

I finally finished it! www.victorzhong.com/writing/refl...

Reflections of a First-year Assistant Professor - Victor Zhong

www.victorzhong.com

2 19

Reposted by Victor Zhong

IVADO @ivado.bsky.social · Aug 19

We would like to extend our warmest thanks to the organizing committee @sivareddyg.bsky.social, Dawn Song, @yoshuabengio.bsky.social, Alane Suhr, @chrisjpal.bsky.social, @yusu-agent.bsky.social and @vzhong.bsky.social.

1 1 2

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Edward Grefenstette @egrefen.bsky.social · Jul 21

Do you have a PhD (or equivalent) or will have one in the coming months (i.e. 2-3 months away from graduating)? Do you want to help build open-ended agents that help humans do humans things better, rather than replace them? We're hiring 1-2 Research Scientists! Check the 🧵👇

3 6 19

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Jul 2

I think in retrospect ARR might have been a bad idea. Am I hallucinating or is there an exodus of junior NLP researchers from *ACL into ML conferences and COLM?

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Jun 18

Are you an established professor in AI open to moving to the University of Waterloo? Please DM me directly!

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · May 16

Flying out of DCA for the first time and I gotta say - this has ought to be one of the worst airports in North America… so cramped people are literally sitting on the ground or standing shoulder to shoulder

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Eliot Higgins @eliothiggins.bsky.social · May 16

This is how digital feudalism works.
It offers the illusion of empowerment. Likes become validation. Followers feel like influence. Monetisation looks like success.

But the rules are hidden. The platform decides what rises and what vanishes.

1 23 110

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Dylan Foster 🐢 @djfoster.bsky.social · May 3

Is Best-of-N really the best we can do for language model inference?

New paper (appearing at ICML) led by the amazing Audrey Huang (ahahaudrey.bsky.social) with Adam Block, Qinghua Liu, Nan Jiang, and Akshay Krishnamurthy (akshaykr.bsky.social).

1/11

1 5 22

Reposted by Victor Zhong

ComputerUseAgents Workshop @workshopcua.bsky.social · Mar 31

Incredible lineup of speakers at #CUA #WORKSHOP @ #ICML2025!

Speakers part 3/3:
Qingyun Wu (Penn State University) @qingyunwu.bsky.social
Zhiyong Wu (Shanghai AI Lab)
Victor Zhong (University of Waterloo, Vector Institute) @vzhong.bsky.social

1 2

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Mar 27

Teaching for the first time: I finished the last official lecture of the class and got a surprise round of applause! Feels so great!

1 8

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Conference on Language Modeling @colmweb.org · Mar 20

A bit of a mess around the conflict of COLM with the ARR (and to lesser degree ICML) reviews release. We feel this is creating a lot of pressure and uncertainty. So, we are pushing our deadlines:

Abstracts due March 22 AoE (+48hr)
Full papers due March 28 AoE (+24hr)

Plz RT 🙏

3 31 37

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Thomas Wolf @thomwolf.bsky.social · Mar 12

We've kept pushing our Open-R1 project, an open initiative to replicate and extend the techniques behind DeepSeek-R1

And even we were mind-blown by the results we got with this latest model we're releasing: ⚡️OlympicCoder

[1/3]

3 18 99

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Mar 11

Jesus…

Reposted by Victor Zhong

waterloosci @waterloosci.bsky.social · Mar 8

#InternationalWomensDay is a time to promote women’s equity by celebrating women’s achievements, raising awareness about discrimination and taking action to forge gender parity. Meet some of the exceptional women in Science who are helping to #AccelerateAction: bit.ly/3XCAft9 @uwaterloo.ca

4 7

Reposted by Victor Zhong

The Beaverton @thebeaverton.com · Feb 21

Report: CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!

Canada being the best at hockey and the best at everything and you can never defeat us and CANADA! CANADA! CANADA!

160 1K 7.9K

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Jan 28

The democratization and commoditization of foundation models is happening and will continue to happen - regulation will not slow nor stop it. Secrecy, propriety moats, and trade embargoes may succeed briefly in AI, but they will fail. And when they do, they will likely fail hard.

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science @uwcheritoncs.bsky.social · Jan 20

📣 Big news for sustainability in tech! 🔋

CS Professor Martin Karsten and his collaborators Peter Cai and Joe Damato have developed a small modification to the Linux kernel — now part of Linux 6.13 — that could cut energy use in data centres by up to 30%.

cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/cherito...

In the photo is Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Martin Karsten in the Davis Centre.

3 9

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Jan 17

Squid games but NeurIPS acceptance

1 10

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Allen School @uwcse.bsky.social · Jan 8

#AI hallucinations are a problem; #UWAllen Ph.D. student @akariasai.bsky.social may have the answer. She was named a @techreviewjp.bsky.social Innovator Under 35 for her work to make #LLMs more transparent and useful—without making stuff up. #IU35 #AIforGood
news.cs.washington.edu/2025/01/07/w...

‘Working to solve global problems’: Allen School Ph.D. student Akari Asai named one of MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Japan - Allen School News

Despite their growing potential and increasing popularity, large language models (LLMs) often produce responses that are factually inaccurate or nonsensical, also known as hallucinations. Allen School...

news.cs.washington.edu

3 17

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Jan 4

Coincidentally when I did research during undergrad, my advisor was also a baby faced fresh graduate. Students used to wander into the lab and ask him where the professor was.

1 4

Reposted by Victor Zhong

Stephanie Chan @scychan.bsky.social · Jan 4

Sadly, we have lost a brilliant researcher and colleague, Felix Hill. Please see this note, where I have tried to compile some of his writings: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

For Felix

Devastatingly, we have lost a bright light in our field. Felix Hill was not only a deeply insightful thinker -- he was also a generous, thoughtful mentor to many researchers. He majorly changed my lif...

docs.google.com

1 16

Victor Zhong @vzhong.bsky.social · Jan 4

On the way back, I was asked if I “go to Waterloo” by undergraduate student. I hesitantly replied yes and eventually had to explain I was a new prof. Student refused to believe me - said I looked like an undergrad 😂

1 5