Zi Wang, Ph.D.
Staff Research Scientist · Google DeepMind
Researching efficient human-AI alignment — helping humans understand AI, and aligning AI to human intent.
I develop methods for proactive agents, sample-efficient evaluation, failure discovery, and automated red teaming. My research builds on expertise in Bayesian optimization and decision-making — modeling uncertainty to guide sequential information gathering and making optimal decisions under uncertainty.
Helping humans understand AI
- Gaussian process probes for uncertainty-aware understanding
- Belief graphs of agents for interpretability
- Proactive failure discovery and efficient evaluation in generative AI
- Learning the underlying constitutions of models
Aligning AI to humans
- Pre-training Gaussian processes to align with expert beliefs
- Proactively gathering information from humans in image and multimodal content generation, and reasoning tasks
- Steering behavior via constitution-guided concept edits
To demonstrate proactive agents that ask clarification questions to seek information, I created the Proactive Co-Creator in Google AI Studio. You can also explore these concepts on my research showcase.
I was a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University in 2025 and have served as an Area Chair for top-tier AI/ML conferences including ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, and NeurIPS since 2023. My teaching experience also includes guest lecturing at HEC Montréal, Boston University, Brown University, and Harvard. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT in 2020, advised by Leslie Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez. View my CV →
News
- Our paper ProEval: Proactive Failure Discovery and Efficient Performance Estimation for Generative AI Evaluation was accepted at ICML 2026!
- Our paper Interpreting and Controlling Model Behavior via Constitutions for Atomic Concept Edits was accepted at AISTATS 2026!