I'm a final-year Ph.D candidate at Mila — Quebec AI Institute, advised by Prof. Aishwarya Agrawal. My research focuses on representation learning, generative modelling, and multimodal LLMs with agents. Previously, I obtained my Bachelor's degree from Fudan University. I have interned at Apple and ServiceNow Research.

I am actively looking for full-time research / engineering positions starting 2026. Feel free to reach out via email or LinkedIn.
Research Interests

I am broadly interested in building intelligent systems that can perceive, reason, and act in the real world.

Representation Learning Generative Modelling & Diffusion Multimodal Large Language Models Agentic AI & Reinforcement Learning

News

Sep 2025 Invited talk at Microsoft Research Bangalore on REARANK
May 2025 Selected as Outstanding Reviewer for CVPR 2025
Mar 2025 SAIL accepted at CVPR 2025 Highlight [project]
Sep 2024 Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 2024
Sep 2024 One paper accepted at EMNLP 2024 Findings
May 2024 One paper accepted at KDD 2024
Feb 2024 One paper accepted at CVPR 2024
Dec 2023 One paper accepted at EMNLP 2023 Findings
May 2022 Two papers accepted at NAACL 2022

Publications

From Where Things Are to What They Are For: Benchmarking Spatial-Functional Intelligence CVPR 2026
Le Zhang, Jihan Yang, [...], Aishwarya Agrawal, Bo-Hsiang Tseng
REARANK: Reasoning Re-ranking Agent via Reinforcement LearningORAL EMNLP 2025
Le Zhang, Bo Wang, Xipeng Qiu, Siva Reddy, Aishwarya Agrawal
Assessing and Learning Alignment of Unimodal Vision and Language Models (SAIL)HIGHLIGHT CVPR 2025
Le Zhang, Qian Yang, Aishwarya Agrawal
VisMin: Visual Minimal Change Understanding NeurIPS 2024
Rabiul Awal, Saba Ahmadi, Le Zhang, Aishwarya Agrawal
Spectrum Matching: a Unified Perspective for Superior Diffusability in Latent Diffusion Preprint
Mang Ning, Mingxiao Li, Le Zhang, Lanmiao Liu, Matthew B. Blaschko, Albert Ali Salah, Itir Onal Ertugrul
Enhancing the Protein Tertiary Structure Prediction by MSA Generation NeurIPS 2024
Le Zhang, Jiayang Chen, Tao Shen, Yu Li, Siqi Sun
Exploring the Best Practices of Query Expansion with LLMs EMNLP 2024 Findings
Le Zhang, Yihong Wu, Qian Yang, Jian-Yun Nie
Unifying Graph Convolution and Contrastive Learning in Collaborative Filtering KDD 2024
Yihong Wu, Le Zhang, Fengran Mo, Tianyu Zhu, Weizhi Ma, Jian-Yun Nie
Contrasting Intra-Modal and Ranking Cross-Modal Hard Negatives to Enhance Visio-Linguistic Compositional Understanding CVPR 2024
Le Zhang, Rabiul Awal, Aishwarya Agrawal
MoqaGPT: Zero-Shot Multi-modal Open-domain Question Answering with Large Language Models EMNLP 2023 Findings
Le Zhang, Yihong Wu, Fengran Mo, Jian-Yun Nie, Aishwarya Agrawal
Investigating Prompting Techniques for Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Question Answering NeurIPS 2024 Workshop
Rabiul Awal, Le Zhang, Aishwarya Agrawal
TreeMix: Compositional Constituency-based Data Augmentation for NLUORAL NAACL 2022
Le Zhang, Zichao Yang, Diyi Yang
Subs: Subtree Substitution for Compositional Semantic Parsing NAACL 2022
Jingfeng Yang, Le Zhang, Diyi Yang

* denotes co-first authorship

Experience

Education
Mila & Université de Montréal
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Sep. 2022 – 2026 (exp.) · Montreal, Canada
Computer Vision & Multimodal Learning
Fudan University
Bachelor
Sep. 2018 – June 2022 · Shanghai, China
Industry & Research
Apple
Ph.D Intern
Feb 2026 – Aug 2026 · Sunnyvale, CA
Multimodal Agentic RL Post-Training
Apple
Ph.D Intern
July 2025 – Sep 2025 · Cupertino, CA
Agentic spatial reasoning benchmarking
ServiceNow Research
Visiting Researcher
Feb 2025 – July 2025 · Montreal, Canada
GUI Agent via Reinforcement Learning
SALT Lab (Prof. Diyi Yang)
Summer Research Intern
May 2021 – Sep 2021 · Remote
Compositional data augmentation for NLU (TreeMix)

Awards

CVPR 2025 Outstanding Reviewer 2025
FRQNT Doctoral Scholarship (100k CAD) 2025
Scholarship for Accelerated Master's-to-Doctoral Transition 2023
UdeM Excellence Scholarship 2023, 2024
Fudan University Outstanding Graduate Scholarship 2022
Huatai Securities Technology Scholarship (First Prize, Top 1%) 2021
Fudan Outstanding Student Scholarship (Second Prize) 2019, 2022

Service

Conference Reviewing

CVPR '24, '25*, '26 NeurIPS '24, '25 ICML '25 ICLR '26 ICCV '25 ECCV '24, '26 AAAI '25 ACL ARR '23–'26 WACV '25 BMCV '26

Journal Reviewing

TMLR ×2 IEEE TIP

Teaching

IFT 6765 - Links between Computer Vision and Language (Winter 2024)