Kun Zhou (周昆)
Kun Zhou is a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego, working with Zhiting Hu and Biwei Huang. His research interests are Representation Learning for Foundation Models, with focuses on World Models and Unified Representation Learning. He obtained Ph.D at Renmin University of China, under the supervision of Wayne Xin Zhao and Ji-Rong Wen, and master degree from Peking University. His work has received 18000+ citation so far.
News
Our five papers are accepted by ACL 2026! See you in San Diego!
Our two papers are accepted by CVPR 2026! See you in Denver!
We release PAN, A World Model for General, Interactable, and Long-Horizon World Simulation!
Research Interests
Currently, my primary research lies in Foundation Model and Multimodal Agent, improving their Width (Universal Memory) and Depth (Reasoning and Planning Abilities) in computer use and real-world scenarios:
- Foundation Models
- World Model: PAN
- Large Language Model: YuLan-Chat
- Evaluation & Diagnosis: Decentralized Arena - ACL 2026, Activation Control - NeurIPS 2026, Ability Modularity
- Unified Memory to Read Anything
- VLM & Agent Memory: Continuous Memory - NeurIPS 2025, Continuous Memory Scaling
- World Model Memory: Plug-and-play Memory
- Memory Self-evolving: HyMEM - ACL 2026
- Reasoning and Planning Ability
- Scaling Synthetic Data & Environment: JiuZhang3.0 - NeurIPS 2024, C-World - ACL 2026
- RL with Skill Disentanglement & Management: Vision-G1 - AAAI 2026, Planner-centric RL
- Tool-Augmented Agent: StructGPT - EMNLP 2023, DELI - NeurIPS 2023, KG-Agent - ACL 2025
Highlighted Projects
- PAN
- A World Model with 21B Parameters for General, Interactable, and Long-Horizon World Simulation!
- JiuZhang3.0, JiuZhang2.0, JiuZhang
- A series of LLMs with SOTA performance on mathematical reasoning!
- YuLan-Chat
- A series of LLM pre-trained on over 1.6TB tokens, and then post-trained via curriculum learning.
- LLMBook, LLMSurvey
- A comprehensive survey and Chinese book for everyone to master the knowledge about large language models.
Experiences
2022.4 - 2023.6, Research Intern, NLC Group, MSRA.
Mentor: Yeyun Gong, Nan Duan
2021.9 - 2022.4, Research Intern, iFLYTEK Research.
Mentor: Jing Sha, Shijin Wang
2019.12 - 2021.5, Research Intern, NLP center, Meituan Dianping.
Mentor: Sirui Wang, Fuzheng Zhang
2018.8 - 2019.6, Research Intern, XiaoIce, Microsoft Asia.
Mentor: Kai Zhang, Yu Wu
Rewards and Honors
- 2025 China Computer Federation (CCF) Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award
- EACL 2024 Evaluation and Model Insight Award
- Six Highly-cited Papers are selected as the most influential KDD/WWW/CIKM papers by PaperDigest:
- 2022 Baidu Scholarship (10 PhD Students) Link
- 2022 Bytedance Scholarship (10 PhD Students in China Mainland) Link
- 2022 MSRA Fellowship (12 PhD Students in Asia-Pacific-region) Link
- 2022 Baosteel Scholarship (12 Students in RUC).
- 2022 National Scholarship.
- LIC2021 Multi-Skill Dialog Challenge Link
- Ranked 1st in Automatic Metrics Track, 3rd in Human Evaluation Track
- LIC2020 Conversational Recommendation Challenge Link
- Ranked 2st in Automatic Metrics Track, 4rd in Human Evaluation Track
- 2018 Jane Street Electronic Trading Challenges
- Ranked 1st
- 2018 The Data Open Challenges Citadel Datathen
- Ranked 2nd
- 2016 American Mathematical Contest in Modeling
- Honorable Mention
- 2015 China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling
- National Second Prize
- 2015 National Zhou Peiyuan college student mechanics competition
- National Third Prize
- 2015 Jiangsu Province Undergraduate Mechanical Competition
- The First Prize
Service
- IJCAI 2021
- Senior PC Reviewer
- AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, SIGIR, WWW, WSDM, ACL, EMNLP, COLING, TOIS, TORS
- PC Reviewer