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Ziqing Wang

Ph.D. Student
Northwestern University
ZiqingWang2029@u.northwestern.edu


About Me

Hello! I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Reliable, Efficient, and Autonomous Learning (REAL) Lab, Department of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University, under the supervision of Prof. Kaize Ding. I completed my Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Microelectronics from Sun Yat-sen University, under the guidance of Prof. Shanlin Xiao. Additionally, I had the opportunity to work as a research assistant at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Guangzhou campus, from 2022 to 2023, where I collaborated closely with Prof. Renjing Xu.

Other than my work, I am a big fan of the Golden State Warriors. My favorite basketball player is Steph Curry. Go Warriors!

Research Interests

I focus on building reliable and efficient AI systems for autonomous decision-making. My current work centers on LLM-based agentic frameworks for high-impact applications in healthcare and biomedicine (e.g., medical visual question answering, clinical reasoning) and AI-driven scientific discovery (e.g., molecular generation and optimization, property prediction), grounded in a long-running line of work on efficient AI including spiking neural networks, efficient transformers, and neural architecture search.

News

- [05/2026]  Glad to release our survey on the OpenClaw ecosystem!!
- [05/2026]  Our paper POLO is accepted to KDD 2026 (Oral)!!
- [05/2026]  One paper is accepted to IJCV!!
- [04/2026]  Two papers are accepted to ACL 2026, See you in San Diego!!
- [02/2026]  One paper is accepted to PAKDD 2026 (Oral), See you in Hong Kong!!
- [12/2025]  Glad to receive the NVIDIA Academic Research Grant.
- [09/2025]  One Paper is accepted to NeurIPS 2025, See you in San Diego!!
- [08/2025]  One Paper is accepted to EMNLP!!
- [05/2025]  Gad to release our survey on LLM-guided Molecular Discovery!!
- [01/2025]  My AAAI paper is selected as an oral paper. See you in Philadelphia!!
- [12/2024]  Glad to receive a AAAI Travel Grant. Thank you, AAAI!!
- [12/2024]  One paper is accepted to AAAI 2025. See you in Philadelphia!!
- [12/2024]  I will serve as a reviewer of ICML 2025.
- [09/2024]  Two papers are accepted to NeurIPS 2024. See you in Vancouver!!
- [08/2024]  One paper is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence.
- [08/2024]  I will serve as a reviewer of ICLR 2025.
- [08/2024]  I will serve as a reviewer of ICASSP 2025.
- [07/2024]  One paper is accepted to ECCV 2024. See you in Milan!!
- [06/2024]  I will serve as a reviewer of TNNLS.
- [06/2024]  I will serve as a PC member of AAAI 2025.
- [05/2024]  I will serve as a reviewer of NeurIPS 2024.
- [03/2024]  Gave a talk at the Intel INRC lab.
- [02/2024]  My ICASSP paper is selected as an oral paper. See you in Seoul!!
- [02/2024]  I will serve as a reviewer of ECCV 2024.
- [01/2024]  I will serve as a reviewer of MM 2024.
- [12/2023]  One paper is accepted to ICASSP 2024.
- [11/2023]  I will serve as a reviewer of CVPR 2024.
- [10/2023]  One paper is accepted to WACV 2024.
- [08/2023]  I will serve as a PC member of AAAI 2024.
- [07/2023]  One paper is accepted to ICCV 2023.
- [06/2022]  One paper is accepted to DSAA 2022.

Publications

Published

2026

  1. ACL
    MolMem: Memory-Augmented Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Sample-Efficient Molecular Optimization
    Ziqing Wang, Yibo Wen, Abhishek Pandey, Han Liu, Kaize Ding
    Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026.
    PDF Code

  2. ACL
    A Survey of Large Language Models for Text-Guided Molecular Discovery: from Molecule Generation to Optimization
    Ziqing Wang*, Kexin Zhang*, Zihan Zhao, Yibo Wen, Abhishek Pandey, Han Liu, Kaize Ding (*equal contribution)
    Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026.
    PDF Code

  3. KDD
    POLO: Preference-Guided Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning for Lead Optimization
    Ziqing Wang, Yibo Wen, William Pattie, Xiao Luo, Weimin Wu, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Abhishek Pandey, Han Liu, Kaize Ding
    [Oral] ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2026.
    PDF

  4. IJCV
    Dynamic Token Masking in Spiking Neural Network
    Yuetong Fang*, Ziqing Wang*, Deming Zhou, Hongwei Ren, Shibo Zhou, Renjing Xu (*equal contribution)
    International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), Volume 134, 2026.

  5. PAKDD
    GlassMol: Interpretable Molecular Property Prediction with Concept Bottleneck Models
    Oscar Rivera, Ziqing Wang, Matthieu Dagommer, Abhishek Pandey, Kaize Ding
    [Oral] Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), 2026.
    PDF Code

  6. ICML-W
    Mamba as Decision Maker: Exploring Multi-scale Sequence Modeling in Offline Reinforcement Learning
    Jiahang Cao, Qiang Zhang, Ziqing Wang, Jingkai Sun, Jiaxu Wang, Hao Cheng, Yecheng Shao, Wen Zhao, Gang Han, Yijie Guo, Renjing Xu
    ICML 2026 Workshop on Decision-Making from Offline Datasets to Online Adaptation (DEMO), 2026.
    PDF

2025

  1. AAAI
    Adaptive Calibration: A Unified Conversion Framework of Spiking Neural Networks
    Ziqing Wang*, Yuetong Fang*, Jiahang Cao, Renjing Xu (*equal contribution)
    [Oral] AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025.
    PDF Code

  2. NeurIPS
    Spiking Neural Networks Need High Frequency Information
    Yuetong Fang, Deming Zhou, Ziqing Wang, Hongwei Ren, Zecui Zeng, Lusong Li, Shibo Zhou, Renjing Xu
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025.
    PDF

  3. EMNLP
    AMANDA: Agentic Medical Knowledge Augmentation for Data-Efficient Medical Visual Question Answering
    Ziqing Wang, Chengsheng Mao, Xiaole Wen, Yuan Luo, Kaize Ding
    Findings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025.
    PDF Code

2024

  1. NeurIPS
    Autonomous Driving with Spiking Neural Networks
    Rui-jie Zhu*, Ziqing Wang*, Leilani Gilpin, Jason K. Eshraghian (*equal contribution)
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.
    PDF Code

  2. NeurIPS
    Spiking Neural Network as Adaptive Event Stream Slicer
    Jiahang Cao*, Mingyuan Sun*, Ziqing Wang*, Hao Cheng, Qiang Zhang, Shibo Zhou, Renjing Xu (*equal contribution)
    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.
    PDF Code

  3. ECCV
    Spiking Wavelet Transformer
    Yuetong Fang*, Ziqing Wang*, Lingfeng Zhang, Jiahang Cao, Honglei Chen, Renjing Xu (*equal contribution)
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024.
    PDF Code

  4. TAI
    Spiking Diffusion Models
    Jiahang Cao*, Hanzhong Guo*, Ziqing Wang*, Deming Zhou, Hao Cheng, Qiang Zhang, Renjing Xu (*equal contribution)
    IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI), 2024.
    PDF Code

  5. ICASSP
    AutoST: Training-free Neural Architecture Search for Spiking Transformers
    Ziqing Wang, Qidong Zhao, Jinku Cui, Xu Liu, Dongkuan Xu
    [Oral] IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2024.
    PDF Code

  6. WACV
    Spiking Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
    Jiahang Cao*, Ziqing Wang*, Hanzhong Guo*, Hao Cheng, Qiang Zhang, Renjing Xu (*equal contribution)
    IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024.
    PDF Code

2023

  1. ICCV
    Masked Spiking Transformer
    Ziqing Wang*, Yuetong Fang*, Jiahang Cao, Qiang Zhang, Zhongrui Wang, Renjing Xu (*equal contribution)
    International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023.
    PDF Code

2022

  1. DSAA
    AMD-DBSCAN: An Adaptive Multi-density DBSCAN for datasets of extremely variable density
    Ziqing Wang, Zhirong Ye, Yuyang Du, Yi Mao, Yanying Liu, Ziling Wu, Jun Wang
    IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA), 2022.
    PDF Code

Preprints

2026

  1. Survey
    A Survey of the OpenClaw Ecosystem: From Platform Extensibility to Constraint Design
    Ziqing Wang, Qijie Zhu, Yu Xiao, Marcelina A. Przespolewska, Erik C. Nisbet, Han Liu, Kaize Ding
    Preprint, 2026.
    PDF Code

  2. arXiv
    HopRank: Self-Supervised LLM Preference-Tuning on Graphs for Few-Shot Node Classification
    Ziqing Wang, Kaize Ding
    arXiv preprint, 2026.
    PDF

  3. arXiv
    RAPTOR: Ridge-Adaptive Logistic Probes
    Ziqi Gao, Yaotian Zhu, Qingcheng Zeng, Xu Zhao, Ziqing Wang, Feng Ruan, Kaize Ding
    arXiv preprint, 2026.
    PDF

Projects

  1. Brain Diffusion: Reconstruct Brain Dynamic from Text Stimula
    Code

Professional Services

Program Committee

Journal Reviewer

Honors and Awards

Miscellaneous

I love travelling and basketball. I am a big fan of the Golden State Warriors. My favorite basketball player is Steph Curry.

Rocky Mountain National Park

Rocky Mountain National Park

Maroon Bells

Maroon Bells

Steph Curry

3

Gold Blooded

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