📝 Selected Publications
🎓 First-Author Top-Tier Conference Papers During My Master's
ICML 2026How can LLMs reason over structured entities of varying complexity?
Scaling-Aware Adapter for Structure-Grounded LLM Reasoning
Zihao Jing, Qiuhao Zeng, Ruiyi Fang, Yan Yi Li, Yan Sun, Boyu Wang, Pingzhao Hu
Designed a entropy-guided smart adapter that focuses on the instruction related parts of 3D entities, solving the longstanding gap of LLMs treating all positions as equally important. Achieves top-1 on 17 out of 18 biology QA benchmarks, making LLM-assisted structural research an operational reality.
ICLR 2026How can LLMs understand 2D and 3D structure, such as molecules?
Entropy-Guided Dynamic Tokens for Graph-LLM Alignment in Molecular Understanding
Zihao Jing, Qiuhao Zeng, Ruiyi Fang, Yan Sun, Boyu Wang, Pingzhao Hu
A dynamic connector that scales representation slots based on complexity, bridging the gap of fixed-size connectors that lose structural detail for large entities. The model ranks #1 on 20 of 21 understanding tasks and trains 3.5× faster under equivalent settings, directly advancing AI-driven drug design.
NeurIPS 2025How can Transformers foundations faithfully embed 1D–3D structures?
Structure-Aware Fusion with Progressive Injection for Multimodal Molecular Representation Learning
Zihao Jing, Yan Sun, Yan Yi Li, Sugitha Janarthanan, Alana Deng, Pingzhao Hu
Built an multimodal encoder that first stabilizes noisy 3D shape data into a reliable prior, solving the longstanding instability in multimodal embedding that incorporate 3D geometry. Ranks #1 on 22/29 molecular property benchmarks with up to 27% better accuracy, and was applied to pipeline for finding Pin1 inhibitors in cancer treatment.
🎓 Additional Work and Co-Authored Publications
- Piccolo2: General Text Embedding with Multi-Task Hybrid Loss Training. Junqin Huang, Zhongjie Hu, Zihao Jing, Mengya Gao, Yichao Wu. SenseTime Technical Report, 2024.
- Attention with Routed-Memory for Learnable Sparse Control. Qiuhao Zeng, ..., Zihao Jing, et al.. ICML 2026.
- SAGA: Structural Aggregation Guided Alignment for Multiview Graph Domain Adaptation. Ruiyi Fang, Jingyu Zhao, ..., Zihao Jing, et al.. ICLR 2026.
- Distilling and Adapting: A Topology-Aware Framework for Zero-Shot Interaction Prediction in Multiplex Biological Networks. Alana Deng, ..., Zihao Jing, Pingzhao Hu. ICLR 2026.
For a complete list, see Google Scholar.
📄 Research Funding
Digital Research Alliance of Canada — RRG Competition Grant 2026
Received 25 RGU-years (≡ 5×A100-80GB GPU-years) on Canada's national supercomputing cluster via the Resources for Research Groups Competition. Estimated commercial value: ~US$80K.
💻 Internships
- Developed Piccolo-GPT, a dual-function LLM supporting both text embedding and generation within a single architecture.
- Trained general-purpose text embedding models (Piccolo2); top-1 on C-MTEB (May 2024).
- Fine-tuned a ~100B LLM for vertical livestream marketing for Sina Weibo.
- Implemented LLM-based denoising and sentiment analysis pipeline for Budweiser; reduced cost >13%.
- Led evaluation and deplopying of super-resolution models for commercialization.
- Contributed to RunGPT of LlamaIndex with our super-resolution pipeline.
📖 Education
- Sep 2024 – Apr 2026MSc, Computer Science, Western University. London, Canada. Supervised by Prof. Pingzhao Hu.
- Sep 2019 – Jun 2024BEng, Software Engineering, Beihang University. Beijing, China. Graduated with Honors.
🎤 Selected Talks / Presentations
🎖 Honors & Awards
- 2023Silver Prize — Feng Ru Cup Science and Innovation Competition(University)
- 2021Third Prize — 13th National Undergraduate Mathematics Competition(National)
- 2021Third Prize — 32nd Beijing Undergraduate Mathematics Competition(Province)
- 2021Outstanding Student Leader Award(University)
- 2021Third Prize — Physics Academic Competition(University)
- 2020H Prize — Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM)(International)
👁 Academic Service
- ICML 2026 — Conference Reviewer, 6 papers reviewed🏅 Gold Reviewer Award
- ICLR 2026 — Conference Reviewer, 5 papers reviewed
- NeurIPS 2026 — Conference Reviewer
- TSALM @ ICLR 2026; AI4GOOD, FMSD, GFM @ ICML 2026 — Workshop Reviewer
- ACM TKDD — Journal Reviewer
- IEEE TNNLS — Journal Reviewer
- NeurIPS 2025 — Conference Volunteer, San Diego
🧑🏫 Mentorship
Teaching Assistant at Western University
- COMPSCI 2211 — Software Tools and Systems Programming (C and Linux) — Fall 2024 · Fall 2025
- COMPSCI 3305 — Operating Systems — Winter 2025 · Winter 2026
👨🏫 Research Values from My Mentors
“Write a paper such that reviewers neither can nor need to ask questions.”
“Read 20+ related papers before discussing ideas with me.”
“A paper should present clear, well-aligned challenges and novelties.”
“If you dig one direction deeper, you will always uncover novelty.”