VLM Agents · Post-training · Embodied AI
Zengyi Wo
Joint Ph.D. Student, Nanjing University & CASIA · PRLab
I study how post-training helps vision-language agents reason, use tools, and act in the physical world.
Biography
I am a joint Ph.D. student at Nanjing University and the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), affiliated with the Pattern Recognition Laboratory (PRLab). I am advised by Prof. Chenyang Si and Prof. Liang Wang.
My research connects VLM agents and post-training with Embodied AI: improving multimodal foundation models for reasoning, tool use, and planning, then grounding these capabilities in embodied systems for manipulation, navigation, and long-horizon decision making.
Before my Ph.D., I worked as an Algorithm Engineer at Baidu on multimodal large language model post-training, including SFT, RLHF, RLVR, and OPD for mathematical and visual reasoning. I received my M.S. in Computer Science from Tianjin University in 2025 and my B.S. from Zhengzhou University in 2022. I was also a Research Intern at Duxiaoman Finance in 2025, working on applied intelligent systems.
Research Interests
Advisors & Collaborators
I am affiliated with PRLab at Nanjing University and jointly trained with the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA). I am advised by Prof. Chenyang Si and Prof. Liang Wang. I am also grateful to collaborate with outstanding researchers, including Prof. Lu Lin at Penn State and Prof. Ruijie Wang at UIUC.
Student Collaborators
I am fortunate to work with motivated student collaborators on topics around VLM agents, post-training, graph learning, and Embodied AI. I especially enjoy hands-on collaboration on research ideas, experiments, paper writing, and open-source projects.
News
Selected Publications
- KDD’25Local Homophily-Aware Graph Neural Network with Adaptive Polynomial Filters for Scalable Graph Anomaly DetectionIn Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2025
- WWW’24Graph Contrastive Learning via Interventional View GenerationIn Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024, 2024
Honors & Awards
- AAAI 2026 Oral Presentation
- KDD 2025 Oral Presentation
- WWW 2024 Oral Presentation
- National Scholarship for Graduate Students, 2021
- Outstanding Graduate Student Award, Tianjin University, 2025
Academic Services
- Reviewer: KDD, AAAI, IJCAI, TKDD
- Program Committee Member: WWW