Mian Zhang

Hi, I'm a CS PhD in UTD, advised by Zhiyu Zoey Chen. I was a research intern at Zoom Gen AI, Tencent AI Lab and a member of the NLP group at Soochow University.

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Research

I work on reinforcement learning and synthetic data to improve the capabilities and reliability of LLM/VLM agents. I am broadly interested in research directions that contribute to AGI.

SELECTED PAPERS

* equal contribution

LogicIF: Complex Logic Instruction Generation
Mian Zhang, Shujian Liu, Sixun Dong, Ming Yin, Yebowen Hu, Xun Wang, Steven Ma, Song Wang, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Haoyun Deng, Zhiyu Zoey Chen, Kaiqiang Song
COLM 2026
code and benchmark
Preference Learning Unlocks LLMs' Psycho-Counseling Skills
Mian Zhang, Shaun M. Eack, Zhiyu Zoey Chen
ACL 2026
code/   dataset and models
HiPRAG: Hierarchical Process Rewards for Efficient Agentic Retrieval Augmented Generation
Peilin Wu, Mian Zhang, Kun Wan, Wentian Zhao, Kaiyu He, Xinya Du, Zhiyu Chen
ICLR 2026
code
MMTok: Multimodal Coverage Maximization for Efficient Inference of VLMs
Sixun Dong, Juhua Hu, Mian Zhang, Ming Yin, Yanjie Fu, Qi Qian
ICLR 2026
Project Page
Search Wisely: Mitigating Sub-optimal Agentic Searches By Reducing Uncertainty
Mian Zhang*, Peilin Wu*, Xinlu Zhang, Xinya Du, Zhiyu Zoey Chen
EMNLP 2025
code
IDEA: Enhancing the Rule Learning Ability of Large Language Model Agent through Induction, Deduction, and Abduction
Kaiyu He, Mian Zhang, Shuo Yan, Peilin Wu, Zhiyu Zoey Chen
ACL 2025
code and data
CBT-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Assisting Cognitive Behavior Therapy
Mian Zhang*, Xianjun Yang*, Xinlu Zhang, Travis Labrum, Jamie C. Chiu, Shaun M. Eack, Fei Fang, William Yang Wang, Zhiyu Zoey Chen
NAACL 2025
dataset
SafeConv: Explaining and Correcting Conversational Unsafe Bahavior
Mian Zhang, Lifeng Jin, Linfeng Song, Haitao Mi, Wenliang Chen, Dong Yu
ACL 2023 (Oral Presentation)
dataset