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
I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT, advised by Leslie Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez. I received my S.M. in EECS from MIT, advised by Stefanie Jegelka and Leslie Kaelbling. I was a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University in 2025. View my CV →
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.
Demo: Proactive Co-Creator
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!