I am a second-year graduate student in CS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Professor Frederic Sala, and part of the Sprocket Lab. I am also happy to be guided by his senior student Nicholas Roberts. My research interests include Foundation Model Interpretability and LLM Reasoning. Before that, I earned my B.S. also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a double major in Computer Science & Mathematics in 2023.

Publications

• Re-Structuring CLIP’s Language Capabilities
  Zhiqi Gao, Frederic Sala.
  MMLS 2025
  [Poster PDF] [Blog Post]

• Theoretical Physics Benchmark (TPBench) – a Dataset and Study of AI Reasoning Capabilities in Theoretical Physics
  Daniel J.H. Chung, Zhiqi Gao, Yurii Kvasiuk, Tianyi Li, Moritz Münchmeyer, Maja Rudolph, Frederic Sala, Sai Chaitanya Tadepalli.
  Preprint
  MMLS 2025 Lightning Talk
  [arXiv] [Website]

• Pretrained Hybrids with MAD Skills
  Nicholas Roberts, Samuel Guo, Zhiqi Gao, Satya Sai Srinath Namburi GNVV, Sonia Cromp, Chengjun Wu, Chengyu Duan, Frederic Sala.
  ICML 2024 Long-Context Foundation Models (LCFM) Workshop.
  ICML 2024 Next Generation of Sequence Modeling Architectures (NGSM) Workshop.
  [arXiv]

Industry Experience

Roblox Corporation

Software Engineer Intern, AI/ML Team May 2023 -- Aug. 2023

• Designed, developed, and deployed a full-stack project with a Slack Bot that integrates Vector Database & Large Language Model which can perform complex Q&A based on custom knowledge by Prompt Engineering.
• Created an efficient data pipeline, ingesting diverse documents (Confluence, Stackoverflow, Github) and generating vector embeddings for rapid retrieval.
• Conducted tests with multiple Large Language Models and different Prompt Design techniques, resulting in a better solution that outperformed the existing Question Answering Slack Bot within the company.

Teaching Experience

Comp Sci 540 — Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

Comp Sci 300 — Programming II

Fall 2023, Spring 2024

Services

Served as a reviewer for NeurIPS 2024, 2025, ES-FoMo@ICML2024

Undergraduate Projects

Tessellations on the Poincaré Half-Plane and Disk

• Participated in the Summer 2022 UW-Madison Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) in Analysis funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), advised by Professor Andrew Zimmer.
  [Poster PDF]

Random Walks on Groups

• Participated in a group project at Madison Experimental Mathematics Lab, which utilized Mathematica to simulate and analyze patterns of random walks in various groups, including \(Z^n\) and the Heisenberg group. Project Mentor: Dr. Nate Fisher
  [Poster PDF]