Zhirui Zhang

LLM Post-Training · Reasoning · Multilingual · Multimodal

Researcher and builder across large-model systems, translation, multimodal capability, and deployable intelligence.

Portrait of Zhirui Zhang

Most recently: AI Technical Advisor and entrepreneurial partner at IDEA Research.

About

I focus on post-training and reasoning models for large language models, while continuing to build on a long research track in multilingual NLP, machine translation, speech translation, and dialogue systems. Across industry labs and product teams, I have worked on frontier-scale pretraining, general post-training, reasoning-oriented optimization, translation and multilingual capability building, and practical deployment in user-facing systems.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Science and Technology of China through a joint training program with Microsoft Research Asia. My recent work bridges academic research and real-world model development, with a sustained interest in reliable, iterative, and deployable large-model systems.

Research Areas

LLM Post-Training Reasoning Models Multilingual Modeling Machine Translation Multimodal Capability Building Production Model Systems

Representative Papers

Influential

Achieving Human Parity on Automatic Chinese to English News Translation

Technical Report 2018

Document-Level Machine Translation with Large Language Models

EMNLP 2023

Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Regularizing Neural Machine Translation by Target-bidirectional Agreement

AAAI 2019

Incorporating BERT into Parallel Sequence Decoding with Adapters

NeurIPS 2020

Simple and Scalable Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

ICLR 2023

Recent

SWE-AGI: Benchmarking Specification-Driven Software Construction with MoonBit in the Era of Autonomous Agents

arXiv 2026

Is PRM Necessary? Problem-Solving RL Implicitly Induces PRM Capability in LLMs

NeurIPS 2025

Safe Delta: Consistently Preserving Safety when Fine-Tuning LLMs on Diverse Datasets

ICML 2025

Simple o3: Towards Interleaved Vision-Language Reasoning

arXiv 2025

Lost in the Source Language: How Large Language Models Evaluate the Quality of Machine Translation

ACL 2024 Findings

Concise Timeline

2025.12 - 2026.3

IDEA Research

AI Technical Advisor and entrepreneurial partner working on model-and-tool systems for MoonBit and more reliable code intelligence.

2024.3 - 2025.9

Huawei

Technical expert leading general post-training, reasoning-model exploration, multilingual capability building, and practical large-model deployment.

2023.11 - 2024.3

StepFun

Algorithm expert contributing to trillion-parameter MoE pretraining, FP8 language-model exploration, and long-context capability validation.

2021.9 - 2023.11

Tencent AI Lab

Senior researcher building translation training platforms, interactive translation models, personalized MT, and multilingual research systems.

2019.7 - 2021.8

Alibaba DAMO Academy

Algorithm expert for multilingual translation, speech translation, automated training pipelines, and commercial translation services.

2015.7 - 2019.6

Microsoft Research

Research intern across MSRA and Redmond, working on neural machine translation, dialogue systems, and controllable text generation.

Academic Service and Awards

Service

Long-term reviewer or program committee member for ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, IJCAI, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR, with prior service as an ACL area chair.

Awards

  • National Scholarship
  • Google Scholarship
  • MSRA Star of Tomorrow Internship Award of Excellence

Short technical notes beyond papers.

I am setting up a lightweight blog for notes on post-training, translation, multimodal systems, and practical lessons from building deployable model stacks.

Models Translation Multimodal Systems

Links