Weijia (Charlie) Zhang

Weijia (Charlie) Zhang

Incoming CS M.S. @ Yale. UIUC CS + Math. NLP / VLM / LLM agent researcher.

Howdy! Iā€™m Weijia Zhang

I am an incoming M.S. student in Computer Science at Yale University (2026 - 2027), admitted to the (Thesis Track) M.S. in Computer Science with Full Scholarship.

I graduated from UIUC in Math + Computer Science with the 2026 C.W. Gear Outstanding Undergraduate Student award, as one of two annual recipients.

Currently, I worked as a research assistant in UIUC U Lab on LLM agents, multimodal agents, and agentic RL, advised by Prof. Jiaxuan You.

Research

My research interests center on LLM agents, especially next-generation AI agents that bridge virtual and physical worlds through socially intelligent, tool-agnostic, and ethically grounded architectures.

  • Multimodal agents: memory, reasoning, tool use, and multi-agent systems
  • Conversational AI: anthropomorphism and social intelligence
  • Post-training: agent SFT and RL

News

Projects

GUIAgentDebugger Permalink

Published:

Self-evolving VLM-agent debugging framework with a GUI-agent error taxonomy and dual-layer memory.

Gamedev

Beyond research, I am a passoinate indie game developer, feel free to check my game work on the game page. I am also willing to discuss the future of AI X Game.

Publications

Research Articles

Where LLM Agents Fail and How They Can Learn From Failures

arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.25370

A study of LLM agent failures and how agents can learn from failed trajectories.

Kunlun Zhu, Zijia Liu, Bingxuan Li, Muxin Tian, Yingxuan Yang, Jiaxun Zhang, Pengrui Han, Qipeng Xie, Fuyang Cui, Weijia Zhang, Xiaoteng Ma, Xiaodong Yu, Gowtham Ramesh, Jialian Wu, Zicheng Liu, Pan Lu, James Zou, and Jiaxuan You

[Paper]

Conference Papers

Education

Yale University

M.S. in Computer Science

2026-08 - 2027-05

Thesis Track with Full Scholarship

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics

2022-08 - 2026-05

2026 C.W. Gear Outstanding Undergraduate Student, one of two annual recipients

GPA: 3.7/4.0

Work Experience

Microsoft Research Asia, Microsoft

Research Intern

Jul 2025 - Sep 2025

Worked on VLM/LLM agent research to improve Microsoft Excel Copilot capabilities.

  • Built the TextAnalysisSFT data pipeline for SFT data generation for the new TextAnalysis API in Excel Copilot.
  • Mined 2000+ real Kaggle samples, filtered heavy-text sheets, generated queries and Office.js code, and validated outputs with SheetEngine.
  • Delivered a dataset that improved Office Script code-generation accuracy by 75%.

Reborn Network

AI Engineer

May 2023 - Jul 2023

Built real-time role-playing agent systems in Unity VR.

  • Developed a role-playing agent Unity VR game enabling agents to interact through text, voice, and VR actions in real time with under 1s latency.
  • Introduced RAG and vector databases to strengthen long-term agent memory, improving dialogue coherence score from 2/5 to 4/5.
  • Designed a reusable character-card framework, enabling a UGC ecosystem and reducing character persona configuration time by 300%.

Tencent, WeChat Group

Software Engineer

Aug 2024 - Sep 2024

Built performance analysis tooling for WeChat Mini Programs and Unity memory profiling.

  • Developed a cross-platform Android and iOS hardware performance analysis tool for WeChat Mini Programs, supporting 200+ partner teams in identifying performance bottlenecks.
  • Built a Unity Mono Memory Profiler that discovered 40+ hidden memory allocation points, reducing memory-leak-related crash rate by 120%.

my schedule

Feel free to check my availability. Times shown in Eastern Time.

Found a good time? Schedule meeting Open full view

Cooperate With Me

Feel free to reach me via email or LinkedIn.