wxzhang-photo

Wenxuan Zhang (张雯轩)

wxzhang [at] sutd.edu.sg

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

Faculty Page | Google Scholar | LinkedIn | X (Twitter) | Zhihu

About me [Short bio]

I am currently a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), under the prestigious "SUTD Assistant Professorship (SAP)" scheme (a competitive research award for early-career faculty). Before this, I was a research scientist at Alibaba Group Singapore. I received my Ph.D. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

My research interests lie broadly in natural language processing and machine learning, though most of my research are centered around large language models these days. I am passinate to advance NLP models that are inclusive, supporting diverse languages and cultures (e.g., multilingual large language models), while also trustworthy through techniques that improve understanding, safety and robustness of language models.

Current and Planned Research Projects (more on research page):
  • [Multilingual] Understanding and enhancing multilingual capabilities of LLMs (SeaLLMs, Babel)
  • [Accessiblity] Making LLMs more accessible, through model compression or model collaboration
  • [Safety] Ensuring safety of LLMs from development to deployment (MultiJail, Safety Neuron)
  • [Evaluation] Comprehensive and fair evaluation of foundation models (M3Exam, Auto-Arena)
  • [Mechanism] Understaning what is happening inside LLMs (Knowledge & Reasoning)
📍Openings: We have multiple fully-funded positions (Postdoc / PhD / 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 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.

Selected Honors & Awards

  • SUTD Assistant Professorship (SAP) award, 2025
  • Alibaba Star (阿里星), Alibaba Group, 2022
  • National Scholarship, MoE of China, 2017
  • National Cyber Security Scholarship (Only 100 undergraduates in China are awarded every year), 2017
  • National Scholarship, MoE of China, 2016

Professional Service

  • Organizing Committee: SSNLP 2025
  • Area Chair: NeurIPS 2025, ACL 2025, COLM 2025, ICLR 2025, NAACL 2025, EMNLP 2024
  • Regular PC Member (or Reviewer): ACL, EMNLP, ACL Rolling Review, COLING; NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, IJCAI; SIGKDD, WWW, WSDM
  • 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)

Invited Talks