About

Hi, I am a second-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at Stanford, where I am fortunately to be advised Prof. James Zou and Prof. Ludwig Schmidt. I obtained my B.S. (Honors) degree in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from Zhejiang University.
Previously, I was a research intern at Microsoft Research and DeepSeek AI. Before that, I was also a visiting research student at UCLA Scalable Analytics Institute (ScAi), supervised by Prof. Yizhou Sun and Prof. Wei Wang.

My research focuses on LLM reasoning and generative models for science, with applications in mathematics, physics, and scientific discovery.

Education

Ph.D. Sep. 2024 - Present Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, U.S. Ph.D. student in Computer Science Advisor: Prof. James Zou and Prof. Ludwig Schmidt

B.S. Sep. 2020 - Jun. 2024 Zhejiang University (ZJU) , Hangzhou, China. B.S.(Honors) in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics Advisor: Prof. Fei Wu

Experiences

Jun. 2025 -- Sept. 2025, AI Frontiers, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, US Research Intern, Work on RL and Tool Use in LLM Reasoning

Jun. 2024 -- Sept. 2024, DeepSeek AI , Beijing, China Research Intern, Work on LLM for Mathematical Reasoning

Feb. 2024 -- Jun. 2024, Machine Learning Group, Microsoft Research Lab - Asia, Beijing, China Research Intern, Work on LLM for decision making

Jun. 2023 -- Oct. 2023, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, U.S. Visiting Research Student, Work on Physics informed ML Supervisor: Prof. Yizhou Sun and Prof. Wei Wang

News

SiriuS and GeoAda are accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
TREAT is accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
Awarded SenseTime Scholarship, a research scholarship selecting 30 undergraduate AI talents in China.
Our paper was selected for the Best Paper Award and a Spotlight Talk at the Neurips 2023 DLDE Workshop!
One paper accepted to AAAI 2023.

Selected Publications and Manuscripts, (Full List: here)

PRISM-Physics: Causal DAG-Based Process Evaluation for Physics Reasoning

Wanjia Zhao*, Qinwei Ma*, Jingzhe Shi*, Shirley Wu, Jiaqi Han, Yijia Xiao, Si-Yuan Chen, Xiao Luo, Ludwig Schmidt, James Zou (* equal contribution)

Preprint 2025

[ Paper] [www] [Website]

GeoAda: Efficiently Finetune Geometric Diffusion Models with Equivariant Adapters

Wanjia Zhao*, Jiaqi Han*, Siyi Gu, Mingjian Jiang, James Zou, Stefano Ermon (* equal contribution)

NeurIPS 2025

[ Paper] [www] [Code]

SiriuS: Self-improving Multi-agent Systems via Bootstrapped Reasoning

Wanjia Zhao, Mert Yuksekgonul, Shirley Wu, James Zou

NeurIPS 2025

[ Paper] [www] [Code]

OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models

Open Thoughts Team

Preprint, 2025

[ Paper] [www] [Code] [Huggingface] [Website]

Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

Yijia Xiao, Wanjia Zhao, Junkai Zhang, Yiqiao Jin, Han Zhang, Zhicheng Ren, Renliang Sun, Haixin Wang, Guancheng Wan, Pan Lu, Xiao Luo, Yu Zhang, James Zou Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang

Findings of EMNLP 2025

[ Paper] [www] [Github]

Physics-Informed Regularization for Domain-Agnostic Dynamical System Modeling

Zijie Huang*, Wanjia Zhao*, Jingdong Gao, Ziniu Hu, Xiao Luo, Yadi Cao, Yuanzhou Chen, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang (* equal contribution)

NeurIPS, 2024

[ Paper] [www] [Code] [Project Website]

Best Paper Award @ NeurIPS 2023 DLDE

Deepseek-prover-v2: Advancing formal mathematical reasoning via reinforcement learning for subgoal decomposition

ZZ Ren, Zhihong Shao, Junxiao Song, Huajian Xin, Haocheng Wang, Wanjia Zhao, Liyue Zhang, Zhe Fu, Qihao Zhu, Dejian Yang, ZF Wu, Zhibin Gou, Sirong Ma, Hongxuan Tang, Yuxuan Liu, Wenjun Gao, Daya Guo, Chong Ruan

Preprint, 2025

[ Paper] [www] [Code] [Huggingface]

DeepSeek-prover-V1.5: Harnessing Proof Assistant Feedback for Reinforcement Learning and Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Huajian Xin, ZZ Ren, Junxiao Song, Zhihong Shao, Wanjia Zhao, Haocheng Wang, Bo Liu, Liyue Zhang, Xuan Lu, Qiushi Du, Wenjun Gao, Qihao Zhu, Dejian Yang, Zhibin Gou, ZF Wu, Fuli Luo, Chong Ruan

ICLR 2025

[ Paper] [www] [Code] [Huggingface] [X.com]

Selected Honors & Awards

NeurlPS 2024 Scholar Award, 2024
Outstanding Graduates of Zhejiang Province and Zhejiang University, 2024
SenseTime Scholarship, 2023
Best Paper Award, NeurIPS 2023 Workshop (Deep Learning and Differential Equation), 2023
Zhejiang University Scholarship - First Prize (Top 3%), 2023
CKC Honors College Scientific Research Scholarship (Top 10 Projects), 2023
Silver Medal of Chinese Physics Olympiad, 2019
First Prize of Chinese Physics Olympiad, 2019

Academic Services

Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML
Volunteer: KDD 2023, NeurIPS 2023

Miscellaneous

I love running, piano, debating, traveling and so much more.
🎤 Champion and Best Debater of the CKC Honors College Debate Tournament
🏃‍♀️ Runner-up of the Women's Pentathlon at Zhejiang University
🎹 Pianist of amateur level 10

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