Zheyuan "Brian" Zhang

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, advised by Prof. Tianmin Shu and Prof. Daniel Khashabi. Previously, I completed my M.S. in Robotics and a Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan, advised by Prof. Joyce Chai, and my B.S. in Computer Science at UMass Amherst.

I work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, with the goal of making human-level machine intelligence and understanding how the brain works. My current research centers on Embodied AI and Continual Learning, particularly latent world models and persistent memory.

News

[2026.05]I started my research intern at Honda Research Institute USA.

[2026.01]Virtual Community accepted to ICLR 2026.

[2025.09]MindJourney accepted to NeurIPS 2025.

[2025.08]One paper accepted to EMNLP 2025.

[2025.03]I will join Johns Hopkins University in Fall 2025.

[2025.01]COMFORT accepted to ICLR 2025 as Oral Presentation.

[2025.01]COMBO accepted to ICLR 2025.

[2024.11]One paper accepted to COLING 2025.

[2024.10]COMFORT accepted to Pluralistic Alignment Workshop @ NeurIPS 2024.

[2024.10]EILeV accepted to Video-Language Models @ NeurIPS 2024.

[2024.09]EILeV accepted to EMNLP 2024.

[2023.10]HAR accepted to EMNLP 2023.

Publications & Projects

AgentOdyssey: Open-Ended Long-Horizon Text Game Generation for Test-Time Continual Learning Agents

Zheyuan Zhang*, Zehao Wen*, Alvin Zhang, Andrew Wang, Jianwen Xie, Daniel Khashabi†, Tianmin Shu†
arXiv 2026 / Project Page / Paper / Code / Documentation

Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society

Qinhong Zhou*, Hongxin Zhang*, Xiangye Lin*, Zheyuan Zhang*, Yutian Chen, Wenjun Liu, Zunzhe Zhang, Sunli Chen, Lixing Fang, Qiushi Lyu, Xinyu Sun, Jincheng Yang, Zeyuan Wang, Bao Chi Dang, Zhehuan Chen, Daksha Ladia, Jiageng Liu, Chuang Gan
ICLR 2026 / Project Page / Paper / Code

MindJourney: Test-Time Scaling with World Models for Spatial Reasoning

Yuncong Yang*, Jiageng Liu*, Zheyuan Zhang, Siyuan Zhou, Reuben Tan, Jianwei Yang, Yilun Du, Chuang Gan
NeurIPS 2025 / Project Page / Paper / Code

Do Vision-Language Models Represent Space and How? Evaluating Spatial Frame of Reference Under Ambiguities

Zheyuan Zhang*, Fengyuan Hu*, Jayjun Lee*, Freda Shi, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Joyce Chai, Ziqiao Ma
ICLR 2025 (Oral) / Project Page / Paper / Code / Dataset

COMBO: Compositional World Models for Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation

Hongxin Zhang*, Zeyuan Wang*, Qiushi Lyu*, Zheyuan Zhang, Sunli Chen, Tianmin Shu, Behzad Dariush, Kwonjoon Lee, Yilun Du, Chuang Gan
ICLR 2025 / Project Page / Paper / Code

Ella: Embodied Lifelong Learning Agents with Non-Parametric Memory

Hongxin Zhang*, Zheyuan Zhang*, Zeyuan Wang*, Zunzhe Zhang, Lixing Fang, Qinhong Zhou, Chuang Gan
MAS Workshop @ ICML 2025 / Project Page / Paper / Code

Explainable Procedural Mistake Detection

Shane Storks, Itamar Bar-Yossef, Yayuan Li, Zheyuan Zhang, Jason J. Corso, Joyce Chai
EMNLP 2025 / Paper / Code

A Combinatorial Approach to Neural Emergent Communication

Zheyuan Zhang
COLING 2025 / Paper

EILeV: Eliciting In-Context Learning in Vision-Language Models for Videos Through Curated Data Distributional Properties

Keunwoo Peter Yu, Zheyuan Zhang, Fengyuan Hu, Shane Storks, Joyce Chai
EMNLP 2024 / Paper / Code

From Heuristic to Analytic: Cognitively Motivated Strategies for Coherent Physical Commonsense Reasoning

Zheyuan Zhang*, Shane Storks*, Fengyuan Hu, Sungryull Sohn, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee, Joyce Chai
EMNLP 2023 / Paper / Code

Low-cost Solution for Vision-based Robotic Grasping

Zheyuan Zhang, Huiliang Shang
IEEE INSAI 2021 (Second Prize) / Paper / Code

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