about/

Hi, I'm Ziheng! :)

I'm a first year informatics Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Prof. Ying Ding.

Before this, I completed my undergraduate in computer science and mathematics at The Ohio State University, where I was advised by Prof. Wei-Lun (Harry) Chao and Dr. Jianyang Gu.

Recently, I'm interested in mechanistic interpretability.

research/

See Google Scholar for the full list of publications.

  • Z. Zhang, N. Hulkund, C. Lee, Z. Mai, H. Shen, Y. Ding, T. Berger-Wolf, S. Beery, W.-L. Chao, J. Gu. “Mind the Tail: Data Selection Through Sparse Concepts” arXiv 2026. [project page] [code]
  • Z. Zhang†, X. Ma, A. Chowdhury, E. G. Campolongo, M. J. Thompson, N. Zhang, S. Stevens, H. Lapp, T. Berger-Wolf, Y. Su, W.-L. Chao, J. Gu†. “BioCAP: Exploiting Synthetic Captions Beyond Labels in Biological Foundation Models” ICLR 2026. [project page] [code]
  • Z. Zhang*, J. Gu*, A. Chowdhury, Z. Mai, D. Carlyn, T. Berger-Wolf, Y. Su, W.-L. Chao. “Finer-CAM: Spotting the Difference Reveals Finer Details for Visual Explanation” CVPR 2025. [demo] [code]

* equal contribution   † co-corresponding

miscellaneous/

  • Furry friends. I have two cats, Dangdang and Money, and one chinchilla, Shunshun. That's them on the right!
    show photos
    Dangdang the cat
    Dangdang
    Money the cat
    Money
    Shunshun the chinchilla
    Shunshun
  • Music. I play both electric and acoustic guitar. My favorite producers are John Mayer and Khalil Fong, and I love blues, soul, and R&B.
  • League of Legends. I am a Grandmaster player, main in Camille and Fiora.
    show proof League of Legends Grandmaster rank