Zhengyuan Dong

Ph.D. Candidate, Data Systems Group Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo

Advisor: Prof. Renée J. Miller

My Research Interests: Information Retrieval, Data Agent, Multimodal Data, Data Discovery

I like jogging, ai for productivity, occult, game and music, and have two parrots.

🏃🧑‍💻🔮🎮🎹🦜🦜

I am open for collaboration, always welcoming discussion.

News

2026 Jul. 🎉 Passed the CompII exam and became a Ph.D. Candidate!
2026 Jun. Our paper Diversed Model Discovery via Structured Table Discovery got accepted by VLDB 2026 TaDA Workshop!

Publications

[Preprint] Paper GitHub Dataset Page
TRL-Bench: Standardizing Cross-Paradigm Representation-Level Evaluation of Tabular Encoders Wei Pang, Xiangru Jian, Hehan Li, Zhixuan Yu, Alex Xue, Jinyang Li, Zhengyuan Dong, Xinjian Zhao, Hao Xu, Chao Zhang, Reynold Cheng, M. Tamer Özsu, Tianshu Yu , arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.09323 (2026)
[VLDB TaDA workshop 2026] Paper Github
Diversed Model Discovery via Structured Table Discovery Zhengyuan Dong, Renée J. Miller , arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.22766 (2026)
[Preprint] Paper HuggingFace Github
ModelTables: A Corpus of Tables about Models Zhengyuan Dong, Victor Zhong, Renée J. Miller , arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.16106 (2025)
[Findings of ACL 2026] Paper Symposium
InteracSPARQL: An Interactive System for SPARQL Query Refinement Using Natural Language Explanations Xiangru Jian, Zhengyuan Dong, M. Tamer Özsu , Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 29599–29624, July 2026
[ICDE Demo 2026] Paper Github
LazyVLM: Neuro-Symbolic Approach to Video Analytics Xiangru Jian*, Wei Pang*, Zhengyuan Dong*, Chao Zhang*, M Tamer Özsu , ICDE Demo Track (2026)
[ICLR 2026] Paper Github Dataset Page
GraphOmni: A Comprehensive and Extendable Benchmark Framework for Large Language Models on Graph-theoretic Tasks Hao Xu*, Xiangru Jian*, Xinjian Zhao*, Wei Pang*, Chao Zhang, Suyuchen Wang, Qixin Zhang, Zhengyuan Dong, Joao Monteiro, Bang Liu, Qiuzhuang Sun, Tianshu Yu , International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
[Preprint] Github Paper v1 Paper v2 Docker Poster ISMB Poster ICIBM
BioMANIA: Simplifying bioinformatics data analysis through conversation Zhengyuan Dong, Han Zhou, Yifan Jiang, Victor Zhong, and Yang Lu , bioRxiv (2023)

Service

Reviewer, ACL ARR, ACL/ICML/NeurIPS/ICLR/CVPR workshop (2025 - present)
Reviewer, TMM, Pattern Recognition (2025 - present)
Reviewer, ICME, KDD, MLSys (2026 - present)
Academic Graduate Mentor, UR2PHD Program , University of Waterloo (2025 - present)

Teaching

Mentor, CS 399 Readings in Computer Science (F25)
Teaching Assistant, CS 348 Introduction to Database Systems (S24, S25)
Teaching Assistant, CS 136 Elementary Algorithm Design and Data Abstraction (W24, F24, W25)
Teaching Assistant, CS 234 Data Types and Structures (S26)

Honors

Prov-Doc Entrance Award, University of Waterloo, 2024
International Doctoral Student Award (IDSA), University of Waterloo, 2024

Talks

2026 Jul. Diversed Model Discovery via Structured Table Discovery at Ph.D. Seminar Talk , University of Waterloo
2025 Dec. An Interactive Tool for SPARQL Query Refinement Using Natural Language Explanations at OnDBD 2025
2025 Nov. Raw Table Synthesis through Decomposition at CAN-CWIC
2025 Jul. Semantic Table Discovery in Model Lakes: A Benchmark at DSG Talk & Ph.D. Seminar Talk , University of Waterloo
2025 Mar. Introduction to Data Lakes and Tabular Data in NLP at R2L Lab
2024 Oct. Scientific Discovery Agent at R2L Lab
2024 Jul. BioMANIA: Simplifying Bioinformatics Data Analysis (Poster) at ISMB
2024 Jan. Language Model Pretraining at CS886 Presentation