Yuzhang Zhong

Yuzhang Zhong

Visiting predoctoral fellow at Northwestern University.
Interested in Human-Centered NLP!

Yuzhang Zhong 钟宇璋 /juːˈʒɑːŋ dʒʊŋ/

🎆 Welcome to my homepage.

I am a visiting predoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, where I am advised by Prof. Stephen Xia. I study Computer Science at the University of Macau (Honours College), expect to graduate in 2027, and spent Spring 2026 as an exchange student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I also collaborate with Prof. Sherry Wu's WInE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

My research interest is Human-Centered NLP. Specifically, I focus on the bidirectional relationship between humans and language technologies:

  • How AI can enhance human subjective initiative - I study how AI systems can help people explore and understand more about themselves, imagine more freely, and expand their ways of thinking.
  • How LLMs/agents can better think and perform in human-like ways - I explore how intelligent agents can reason, act, and interact in ways that better reflect human intentions, contexts, and ways of thinking.

💬 I am fascinated by AI as a medium for imagination: not only as a tool for automation, but also as a space that can naturally inspire people to think beyond habitual frames.

Selected projects I have worked on or am currently developing:

How AI can improve humans’ subjective initiative

  • RewindAI - An AI-clone-based system that helps users revisit past decision points and simulate how paths they did not choose might have unfolded, supporting deeper self-reflection.
  • AI-Generated Entities in Collaborative Writing - A theory-driven NLP and linguistics study of how AI-introduced entities influence meaning-making and the creative process in human-AI collaborative writing.
  • Dream Factory - An interactive learning system where users role-play characters from textbook materials with LLM agents to better understand the characters, stories, and historical contexts.

How LLMs/agents can better think and perform in human-like ways

  • SNS-Grasp - A semantic-guided grasp generation framework that injects object-level intent into the denoising process, helping robots generate grasps that better match how humans intend to use objects.
  • Flexible Smart Glasses - A reconfigurable smart-glasses platform that empowers users to actively configure wearable sensors for context-aware AI interaction, supporting more personalized robot control, physiological awareness, and embodied self-agency.
  • VagueLlama@SP500 - A project exploring how vague language in financial reports reflects management confidence and relates to stock-price trends.

News

Beyond Research

✈️ Outside research, I enjoy travelling, board games, singing, and movies. I have visited the United States, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

🌶️ I am from Chengdu, and I love spicy food. Fellow spicy-food lovers are always welcome to reach out.

📮 I am also a RedNote creator, sharing pieces of life, romance, reflection, and projects I build, with 38k+ likes and favorites.

I Am Looking For

I am always looking for ambitious professors, advisors, and collaborators who enjoy building thoughtful AI systems with a human-centered spirit. I am also happy to talk with people from the humanities, psychology, economics, and other fields who are interested in Human-Centered NLP. Please feel free to reach out if our interests overlap.

Other Ideas

I also enjoy exploring small humanities-oriented ideas and creative tools.

  • Dream of the Red Chamber Emotional Landscape - A digital humanities project for reading Dream of the Red Chamber through space, characters, and emotional heat across 120 chapters, selected as an excellent work for Zhihu’s Seeing Humanity Anew with AI event.
  • Stray Cats Simulator - An interactive simulation of stray cats’ everyday lives on RedNote, reaching 200,000+ users in 10 days and ranking #3 among all mini-games on the platform.
  • Movie Companion.skill - A spoiler-free Codex movie companion that stays with the current moment instead of revealing what comes next, and one of the earliest REDskills on RedNote.

These ideas are not directly tied to my main research agenda, but I enjoy exploring them. Please feel free to reach out if any resonate with you.

Views --