Zora (Zhiruo) Wang
็่ท่ฅ
PhD Student
Carnegie Mellon University
Language Technologies Institute
About Me
I am currently a PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University working with Daniel Fried and Graham Neubig. My primary research interest is to use programmatic approaches to solve real-world tasks. Particularly, I am working on:
Memory- and Skill-Adaptive Agents
- Digital agents that learns navigation workflows in memory [AWM] and specialized skills as actuators [ASI] [SkillWeaver]; build verifiable and efficient toolboxes for math, data analysis, and visual reasoning tasks [TroVE]
- These agents often facilitate human verification [TroVE] and improves task success [CowPilot]
- On versatile tasks such as presentation making [AutoPresent], software engineering [ODEX], and popular professions [TAC]
Augmented Language Models
- Tools [Survey]: designed by human experts [AutoPresent] or LMs [TroVE]; their behaviors to under-specified queries and execution failures [Fail-TaLMs]
- Programs: Challenging benchmarks for open domain [ODEX], multilingual [MCoNaLa], and data science [HiTab] problems; Performant code LMs [StarCoder] [ECCO] with [Code RAG], assistive [APIs], and libraries in [DocPrompting]
- Knowledge: retrieve texts [FilCo] [ReAtt] [RAGGED] and structured data [WikiTable] [TUTA]
News
- Apr 2025: Released two new works on agent skill induction via online adaptation [ASI]๐ and offline exploration [SkillWeaver]
- Apr 2025: Gave an tutorial at the 2nd CMU Agent Workshop about "Language Model-Based Agents" [slides]
- Mar 2025: Gave an invited talk at Advancing LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration Workshop
- Mar 2025: Gave two talks at AAAI Web Agent Revolution Workshop, about [i] Agent Workflow Memory and Tool Use and [ii] The Agent Company.
- Jan 2025: Check out our new work [CowPilot]๐ฎ that enables flexible human-agent web automation. Participate in the user study if you are interested!
- Jan 2025: Check out the podcast episode about interesting discussionsโจ around "Agent Workflow Memory" [link]
- Dec 2024: Gave a talk at Tsinghua University about "From Workflows to Tools: Building Adaptive Agents On the Fly" (slides)
- Nov 2024: Gave a talk at UIUC iSE Seminar about "Solving Real-World Tasks via Program Generation". Feel free to check out my slides here.
๐พ Older News
Upcoming Events
- Apr 2025: I will attend NAACL (with my cat ๐ฑ) and present three works: [CodeRAG-bench], [CowPilot], and [Fail-TaLMs]. Excited to meet people in Albuquerque!
- May 2025: I will be in the Bay Area visiting Stanford. Happy to meet new people & catch up with old friends during the summer!
My Recent Favorite Publications
Get Connected
If you want to get connected, discuss potential project ideas, ask about CMU application, or chat about any other relevant topics, my office hours are available every Friday 4-5 pm EST. Email me to secure a time to chat!
I often mentor a small number of students every semester, please fill out this application form if you're interested in working with me! However, as I got plenty of emails, I might not be able to reply to all of them.
If you are from underrepresented groups, or do not have much research experience, you are encouraged to reach out!
If You're Interested in My Name
My name in Chinese is ็่ท่ฅ, which reads as Wang, Zhiruo. It is usually hard for non-native speakers to pronounce, so you can also call me Zora (as ZR is similar to Zhi Ruo).
I love my name, especially in Chinese characters, since it has a more beautiful meaning than in English alphabets. ่ท stands for ็ฝ่ท (Angelica dahurica) and ่ฅ stands for ๆ่ฅ (Pollia japonica), which are two kinds of Chinese herbal medicine. Also, ่ท่ฅ is a beautiful vanilla ๐ฟ