wxzhang-photo

Wenxuan Zhang 张雯轩

wxzhang [at] sutd.edu.sg

National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellow

SUTD Assistant Professor
Information Systems Technology and Design Pillar
Singapore University of Technology and Design

Faculty Page | Google Scholar | LinkedIn | X (Twitter) | 小红书

About me

I'm an Assistant Professor at the Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), under the SAP research award. I'm also a Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellow (Class of 2026). Before this, I was a research scientist at Alibaba Group Singapore with the Ali Star award. I received my Ph.D. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, advised by Prof. Wai Lam.

My research interests lie broadly in natural language processing, large language models, and LLM agents. I lead the iNLP Lab where we aim to build AI systems that work reliably and efficiently for diverse people, languages, and real-world settings. Currently, we focus on:

  • [Multilingual & Multicultural LLMs] Building (and understanding) LLMs for diverse languages and cultural contexts (SeaLLMs, Babel, SeaLLMs-Audio, Abstract-Thought, a recent overview talk)
  • [Social World Models] How AI agents can model social environments, simulate interactions, and predict behavior in culturally and socially diverse settings (MoltNet, MASim)
  • [Efficiency & Small LMs] Making LLMs/agentic systems more efficient and trustworthy under real-world resource constraints (e.g., Custom Pruning, PEAR)
  • [Evaluate -> Improve] Dynamic evaluation in interactive settings (M3Exam, Auto-Arena, DR-Arena)

📍We have multiple fully-funded positions (Postdoc / PhD (2027 Spring) / Visiting) available — see [details]. Feel free to email me if you're interested. Students with relevant research or publication experience will be preferred.

News

(I have to admit this section doesn't get updated as often as my social media accounts do)
  • [Apr 2026] We have 6 papers accepted to ACL 2026, see you in San Diego :)
  • [Feb 2026] Excited to share that I'm awarded NRF Fellow (Class of 2026)!
  • [Jan 2026] Happy to share that we have 4 papers accepted to ICLR 2026 (out of 4 submissions!)
  • [Jan 2026] Invited to serve as Registration Chair for AACL 2026
  • [Jan 2026] Invited to serve as Area Chair for COLM 2026
  • [Dec 2025] Excited to share that our project about "Culturally-Aware Proactive Conversational AI" has been awarded SGD 1M in funding under the AISG Research-Governance Grant!
  • [Nov 2025] Invited to serve as an area chair at ICML 2026
  • [Nov 2025] Happy to share that I will give a talk at AAAI 2026 New Faculty Highlight Programme!
  • [Oct 2025] Glad to give a talk at China-Singapore InnovateConnect 2025 on "Culturally Intelligent AI"
  • [Sep 2025] Glad to be listed as a Stanford Top 2% Scientist this year!
  • [Aug 2025] Invited to serve as an area chair for ICLR 2026
  • [May 2025] Glad to share that we have 8 (out of 8 submissions!) papers accepted to ACL 2025, huge congrats to all students, and see you in Vienna 🇦🇹! (Coffee chats are welcome!)
  • [Apr 2025] I was interviewed at AIMX Podcast to share my thoughts on various topics of multilingual LLMs, also got the chance to share SeaLLMs-Audio and Babel project, check it out on Spotify!
  • [Mar 2025] I will serve as an area chair for COLM 2025 and NeurIPS 2025
  • [Mar 2025] We release SeaLLMs-Audio - the multimodal (audio) extension of SeaLLMs and the first large audio-language model designed to support multiple Southeast Asian languages!
  • [Mar 2025] We release Babel - open-source multilingual LLMs that serve over 90% of global speakers. Two sizes of models (9B and 83B) have been released, both base and chat versions are open-sourced!
  • [Feb 2025] I officially joined SUTD!
  • [Jan 2025] Thrilled to receive the prestigious "SUTD Assistant Professorship (SAP)" award
  • [Oct 2024] Glad to be invited to give a keynote talk at SSNLP 2024.
  • [Aug 2024] I will serve as an Area Chair for ICLR 2025
  • [July 2024] SeaLLMs 3 is here - the latest iteration of SeaLLMs with SOTA performance of diverse tasks while specifically enhanced to be more trustworthy. Check out the model and paper!
  • [June 2024] SeaLLMs was awarded the "Best Innovate for Impact Award" by The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) of United Nations.
  • [May 2024] M3Exam was officialy used to evaluate GPT-4o's multilingual and multimodal capability.
  • [Apr 2024] I am honored to speak at SCS and IMDA about our SeaLLMs project and the evaluation / safety measures we've implemented during the development.
  • [Nov 2023] We release SeaLLMs - the first LLM dedicated to languages in Southeast Asia region.

Awards

  • National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellow, 2026
  • AAAI New Faculty Highlight, 2026
  • World's Top 2% Scientists (by Stanford and Elsevier), 2025
  • SUTD Assistant Professorship (SAP) award, 2025
  • Alibaba Star (阿里星), Alibaba Group, 2022
  • National Cyber Security Scholarship (only 100 undergrads awarded annually in China), 2017
  • National Scholarship, 2016 & 2017

Service

  • Organizing Committee:
  • Area Chair:
    • 2026: ACL 2026, ICML 2026, COLM 2026, ICLR 2026, NLPCC 2026
    • 2025: EMNLP 2025, NeurIPS 2025, ACL 2025, COLM 2025, ICLR 2025, NAACL 2025
    • 2024: EMNLP 2024
  • Journal Reviewer: Computational Linguistics (CL), ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB), Neurocomputing, Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLP)

Funding

  • Principal Investigator. 2026 - 2028. AI Research-Governance Joint Grant (AI Singapore). SGD $1,019,408.
    Culturally-Aware Proactive Conversational AI for Enhancing Social Resilience in Singapore.
  • Principal Investigator. 2025 - 2026. Agency: HTX. SGD $1,495,000.
    Development of Compact and Operationally Tuned Large Language Model.
  • Principal Investigator. 2025 - 2026. Agency: DSO. SGD $600,000.
    Investigating Various Strategies for Effective Pre-Training of LLMs.
  • Principal Investigator. 2025 - 2028. SAP award (under MoE AcRF Tier 1). SGD $499,950.
    Towards Linguistically Inclusive and Computationally Efficient Large Language Models.
  • Co-Principal Investigator. 2025 - 2028. National Multi-Modal LLM Programme. SGD $4,900,000.
    LLM Architecture-Language Nexus: A Unified Analysis Framework

Recent Talks

Teaching