Greetings!
Zilin Xiao received his CS PhD at
Rice University, where he was fortunately advised by
Prof. Vicente Ordonez.
His research broadly focuses on vision-language models, large language models, and their reasoning &
embedding capabilities -- especially how reasoning and retrieval can be mutually beneficial for each other.
His recent research interests lie in:
- Vision-Language Models (VLMs): grounding, alignment, and reliable multimodal reasoning
- Large Language Models (LLMs): post-training for reasoning-centric models
- Embeddings & Retrieval: retrieval, re-ranking and representation learning
[2026.04] Zilin successfully defended his PhD thesis Teaching Vision-Language Models to Retrieve and Reason!
[2026.01] MetaEmbed and ProxyThinker are accepted to ICLR 2026!
[2025.10] We present MetaEmbed, the first work that introduce test-time scaling in multi-vector retrieval.
[2025.05] We present ProxyThinker, a training-free paradigm that steers a VLM to behave like a RL slow-thinking model.
[2025.02] LOCORE is accepted to CVPR 2025! We are the first to use long-context sequence
model to do list-wise re-ranking at the local feature level.
[2025.02] Zilin will join Meta GenAI as a research intern in 2025 Summer!
[2024.09] ReHEAT is selected as oral spotlight presentation at COLM 2024!
[2024.07] ReHEAT is accepted to COLM 2024. We explore the connection between language
models and a famous psychological cognitive trap called representativeness heuristic.
[2024.07] AutoVER is accepted to ECCV 2024. We augment modern multi-modal language model
with precise entity retrieval ability w/ guided generation.
[2024.05] Zilin joined Tencent AI Lab Seattle as a research intern.
[2023.10] Two first-authored papers are accepted to EMNLP 2023 (InsGENEL for Main and
CoherentED for Findings).
[2023.08] Zilin is now a first-year PhD student at Rice.
[2022.08] Zilin joined EdgeML Team @ Microsoft as a gap-year research intern.
Rice University
Ph.D. in Computer Science with
Prof. Vicente Ordóñez Román
Aug 2023 - May 2026
Sichuan University
B.Eng. in Computer Science with
Prof. Yanan Sun
Sep 2018 - Jun 2022
Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
Research Internship with Dr. Qi Ma at MSL Search, May 2025 - Mar 2026
Focus on scaling multimodal retrieval at test-time with VLMs.
Tencent AI Lab Seattle
Research Internship with
Dr. Hongming Zhang
and
Dr. Tao Ge
, May. 2024 - Aug. 2024
Focus on efficient decoding for large language models.
Microsoft
Residency Research Internship with
Dr. Ming Gong
and
Linjun Shou
, Aug. 2022 - Jun. 2023
Focus on knowledge-aware and topic-driven entity linking with retrieval-augmented
language models.
National Scholarship
Top 0.2% nationwide, 2019
National Scholarship
Top 0.2% nationwide, 2020
Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis of Sichuan University
2022.06
Star of Computer Science, Sichuan University
2022.06
Reviewer: EMNLP, ACL ARR, NeurIPS, ICLR, AISTATS, ICML
Teaching Assistant: 2024 Spring COMP 646 - Deep Learning for Vision and Language
Guest Lecture: What could be the Next Generation of LLMs?
Teaching Assistant: 2024 Fall COMP 554 - Reinforcement Learning
Hobbies (Click to Expand)
Blockchain: Interested in blockchain technologies and their long-term impact on global finance (Solidity, cryptocurrencies, DeFi).
Trading: Follow markets closely and enjoy turning observations into profit.
Law: Familiar with criminal law in Mainland China.
Flight Simulator: Fly the Airbus A320neo in Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Racing 🏎: Track-day enthusiast. Spend time on tracks in California and Texas (Thunderhill East, Circuit of the Americas, MSR Houston, and growing...).
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