I am a third-year PhD student in CS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Professor Frederic Sala. My research focus is on large language models and foundation models; I am particularly interested in i) how to improve their performance，particularly via data selection and curation and ii) how to evaluate them.

I am actively seeking a Summer 2026 internship in related fields, please feel free to reach out to me at zhiqi [at] cs [dot] wisc [dot] edu

Publications

Conference Publications

• Pretrained Hybrids with MAD Skills
  Nicholas Roberts, Samuel Guo, Zhiqi Gao, Satya Sai Srinath Namburi GNVV, Sonia Cromp, Chengjun Wu, Chengyu Duan, Frederic Sala.
  COLM (Conference on Language Modeling) 2025
  [arXiv]

Journal Publications

• 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.
  MLST (Machine Learning: Science and Technology) 2025
  MMLS (Midwest Machine Learning Symposium) 2025 Lightning Talk
  [arXiv] [Website]

Workshop Publications

• Test-time Scaling Techniques in Theoretical Physics—A Comparison of Methods on the TPBench Dataset
  Zhiqi Gao, Tianyi Li, Yurii Kvasiuk, Sai Chaitanya Tadepalli, Maja Rudolph, Daniel J.H. Chung, Frederic Sala, Moritz Münchmeyer
  NeurIPS 2025 Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences (ML4PS) Workshop
  [arXiv]

• Re-Structuring CLIP’s Language Capabilities
  Zhiqi Gao, Frederic Sala.
  MMLS (Midwest Machine Learning Symposium) 2025
  [Poster PDF] [Blog Post]

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 Models (LLMs) which can perform complex Q&A based on custom knowledge by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), resulting in a better solution that outperformed the existing Question Answering Slack Bot within the company.
• Created an efficient data pipeline, ingesting diverse documents (Confluence, Stack Overflow, GitHub) and generating vector embeddings for rapid retrieval.

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

Advisor: Professor Andrew Zimmer.

• Contributed to the “Tessellations on the Poincaré Half-Plane and Disk” project in the Summer 2022 UW-Madison Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) in Analysis funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Developed a visualization tool to demonstrate principles of hyperbolic geometry for education purposes, allowing users to generate and explore tessellations on the Poincaré disk and half-plane, aiding students in comprehending complex concepts.
  [Poster PDF]

Random Walks on Groups

Advisor: Dr. Nate Fisher

• Participated in a group project at Madison Experimental Mathematics Lab. Implemented Mathematica simulations to investigate the asymptotic properties of random walks on algebraic structures like $\mathbb{Z}^n$ and the Heisenberg group, quantifying metrics and analyzing their long-term pattern, such as expected travel distance, expectation of hitting time, and distribution of hitting location.
  [Poster PDF]