Zhehao Zhang
PhD Student in Computer Science & Engineering (Language Agent Safety + LLM Alignment)
I am a first year PhD student in Computer Science & Engineering at The Ohio State University, with research interests in Language Agent Safety and Robustness of Large Language Models and Alignment. My work focuses on evaluating and mitigating the refusal behavior of LLMs, developing methods to improve the safety and reliability of language models in real-world applications.
Previously I have worked as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon and have collaborated with researchers at Stanford SALT Lab, Adobe Research, and Microsoft Research Lab – Asia, working on cutting-edge NLP research and applications.
Education
2025 — Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Advisor:
Research focus: Language Agent Safety and Robustness of LLMs, Alignment
2023 — 2024
M.S. in Computer Science
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Research focus: Natural Language Processing
2019 — 2023
B.Eng. in Artificial Intelligence (Honor Class)
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
Honor Class in Artificial Intelligence
Industry Research Experience
Jun 2026 — Aug 2026
Netflix, Los Gatos, CA
Machine Learning Intern, Netflix
Work as a machine learning intern on large language models and language agents.
Nov 2024 — Jun 2025
Amazon, Seattle, WA
Applied Scientist Intern, People eXperience and Technology (PXT) Central Science
Work as an applied scientist intern on evaluating and mitigating the refusal behavior of LLMs.
Jun 2024 — Aug 2024
Adobe Research, San Jose, CA
Research Intern, Adobe Research
Research in multi-modal large language models and visual perception enhancement.
Dec 2022 — Aug 2023
Microsoft Research Lab – Asia, Beijing, China
Research Intern, Data, Knowledge, and Intelligence Group
Research in hierarchical table analysis and complex reasoning question answering over tabular data.
Academic Research Experience
2025 — Present
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
PhD Student, OSU NLP Lab
Mentor:
Research in Language Agent Safety and Robustness of LLMs, Alignment. Advised by Prof. Yu Su and Prof. Huan Sun.
2023 — 2024
Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Research Intern, Social and Language Technologies (SALT) Lab
Mentor:
Research in Natural Language Processing, focusing on synthetic data and dynamic evaluation of large language models.
Honors and Awards
2026
ICML Gold Reviewer
2025
Graduate Fellowship
awarded by Ohio State University
2025
COLM 2025 Travel Grant
2025
ICLR Notable Reviewer
2023-2025
Merit Scholarship
awarded by Dartmouth College
2019-2023
Zhiyuan Honor Scholarship and Merit Scholarship
awarded by SJTU
Publications
For the most up-to-date list of publications, please refer to my Google Scholar profile.
Conference
C9
The 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 2026.
C8
The 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 2026.
C7
Conference on Language Modeling (COLM). 2025.
C6
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). Vancouver, Canada, 2024.
C5
The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 2026.
C4
Findings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Miami, FL, USA, 2024.
C3
Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). Mexico City, Mexico, 2024.
C2
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Singapore, 2023.
C1
Findings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Singapore, 2023.
Journal
J2
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). 2025.
J1
Computational Linguistics (CL). 2023.
Preprint
3
arXiv preprint (arXiv). 2026.
2
arXiv preprint (arXiv). 2026.
1
arXiv preprint (arXiv). 2025.
Service
| Reviewer | EMNLP 2023, 2024; NeurIPS 2023, 2024, 2025; NAACL 2024; ACL 2024, 2025; COLM 2024 CIKM 2024, 2025; ICLR 2025; COLING 2025; IJCAI 2025; IEEE TNNLS Journal |
| Volunteer | EMNLP 2023; NAACL 2024 |
References
Prof. Yu Su Associate Professor, Computer Science & Engineering The Ohio State University su.809@osu.edu
Prof. Huan Sun Associate Professor, Computer Science & Engineering The Ohio State University sun.397@osu.edu
Prof. Diyi Yang Assistant Professor, Computer Science Stanford University diyiy@cs.stanford.edu
Dr. Ryan Rossi Principal Research Scientist Adobe Research ryrossi@adobe.com