On June 13, the news report of "Zhejiang University Promoting the High-Quality Development of Talent Cultivation and Discipline Construction" broadcast by the News of CCTV is widespread in the WeChat of people of Zhejiang University. The man interviewed in the news was Qi Zhenting, a 23’ undergraduate majoring in Computer Engineering in ZJUI.

Qi Zhenting

23’ Computer Engineering undergraduate of ZJUI

1. In the application season, he won 13 offers from world-famous universities such as Harvard University, Yale University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, ETH Zurich, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Duke University, etc.
2. 7 papers have been published, including 4 papers published by him as the first author, with 28 citations
3. With a definite objective in view, he keeps seeking, and adheres to what he loves.
4. A versatile student who is full of exploration desire and loves to challenge himself.

With a definite objective, he consolidates a strong foundation and strengthens his abilities on the road of learning

"Firstly, it is necessary to clarify your own goals, avoiding detours as much as possible." Over the past four years of university, Qi Zhenting has always upheld this belief, and it is precisely because of this that every transformation he undergoes is a form of growth.

He extensively delves into various branches of his major, seeking directions that interest him. For four years, he actively explored various branches in the field of computer engineering, from low-level basic problems to high-level application problems. Moreover, he is not limited to the teaching in the classroom and adheres to his own exploration and practice. "The classroom cannot encompass all knowledge, but it teaches us how to learn actively. We need to focus on our own goals, make full use of extracurricular resources to identify and fill gaps, and lay a solid foundation. " Qi Zhenting shared with us.

From a novice who is ignorant and groping for branches of professional fields to a pioneer who explores basic problems and applied research in depth, from initially feeling lost to gradually becoming proficient, Qi Zhenting summarizes his learning techniques with " Improve efficiency". "I don't have any particularly wonderful learning methods, but I will try my best to improve my work efficiency. At the macro level, it is necessary to set goals and stick to the direction of progress. At the micro level, it is necessary to manage my energy and make proper choices. I usually consider from four aspects: physical health, emotions, thinking, and willpower, ensuring that energy is abundant and reasonably allocated to work and entertainment." Qi Zhenting told us.

Looking back on the past four years, Qi Zhenting is grateful to ZJUI for its superior international environment and English teaching. This has allowed him to have a profound on-site experience of the teaching and research atmosphere in American universities, and to adapt early to the English academic environment, laying the foundation for further education in the United States. He believes that his greatest benefit from ZJUI lies in the cultivation of proactive learning and innovative exploration abilities. "The interdisciplinary curriculum system and practical training of ZJUI, as well as the unique teaching methods of professors, have helped me cultivate my research and practical abilities and self-learning abilities, bringing me continuous learning improvement,” said Qi Zhenting.

His clear and targeted planning, perseverance in exploration, rich and extensive research training, nearly full GPA and Honorary Recommendation of Graduation with Highest Honors, all established a solid foundation for him to ultimately receive 13 offers from prestigious universities. The 13 offers from Harvard University, Yale University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California Berkeley, ETH Zurich, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Duke University, etc. have successfully ended his four years of tireless undergraduate career. In the end, he chose Harvard University's two-year research program in Computational Science and Engineering to continue his studies. "I chose this program because of its flexible curriculum, convenience in finding jobs and switching to a Ph.D. program. Additionally, Harvard University and MIT share extensive teaching and research resources, and have a strong alumni network," Qi Zhenting shared.

Engaged in innovation, he diligently pursues knowledge and truth in the path of research

While diligently and excellently completing academic tasks, Qi Zhenting actively explores various research directions. He has previously completed two research projects, namely multimodal question answering over Text, and Images and human body pose recognition and 3D reconstruction, at Yuquan Campus, ZJU. He also independently replicated the computational graph of PyTorch (a deep learning framework), developing a solid foundation in research skills. Additionally, he conducted research on image anomaly detection under the guidance of ZJUI Assistant Prof. Wang Gaoang, accumulating practical experience in the field of computer vision. During his exchange program at UIUC, he conducted research on video anomaly detection in collaboration with ZJUI Adjunct Faculty and UIUC Associate Prof. Volodymyr Kindratenko, as part of the ECE 397: Individual Study course. He successfully completed the project with outstanding results and published a paper as the first author at the ICTAI 2022 conference in the field of IEEE Artificial Intelligence.

Qi Zhenting and Prof. Volodymyr Kindratenko

In March 2022, he joined the LILY laboratory at Yale University and has since been actively involved as a major member in five projects. He has published multiple papers as a co-first author or second author in top-tier natural language processing conferences such as ACL, EACL, and EMNLP. In his co-first-authored paper titled “LoFT: Enhancing Faithfulness and Diversity for Table-to-Text Generation via Logic Form Control,” he independently designed a tree-structured logic generation and validation algorithm and significantly improved the execution efficiency on tables. By employing explicit content extraction and executable data block control model output, he addressed the issues of logical fallacies and uncertainty in reasoning for table-to-text generation, achieving top scores on multiple public benchmarks. This work was selected into the EACL 2023 oral presentation (top 20% of accepted papers).

In addition to his research training, he actively participates in professional internship programs. In August 2022, he interned at a Shanghai-based AI startup and joined the large-scale model research group. As the primary lead, he conducted research on instruction fine-tuning and its related branch projects. Based on the cooperative loss of dynamic features in the intrinsic dimensionality of the latent space of models and dual-text representation space, he independently developed a robust and efficient training framework. This framework effectively mitigated the negative impact of noisy distributions on model fine-tuning and achieved excellent performance on both public and domain-specific datasets. The outcomes of his research were applied to real-world projects within the company, and he subsequently completed a paper as the first author, which was published at ACL 2023. In early 2023, he successfully passed the research intern interview at Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing), embarking on new explorations. To date, he has collaborated with scholars from renowned universities and institutions such as Fudan University, The University of Hong Kong, Meta AI, Google, Salesforce, and the Allen Institute. He has published a total of seven papers, with four of them as the first author.

In repeated research practices, he has grasped the true essence of research and has become more determined in the direction of future development.

Standing fast at his passion, he gains knowledge and experience, and writes about life on the road of youth

In addition to academic and scientific research, Qi Zhenting has a fulfilling and colorful leisure life, and his "desire to explore" is one of his biggest characteristics. He loves exploration and is curious about unfamiliar fields, as if forever full of motivation and determination to change and improve himself.

He actively engages in social services and public welfare practices while delving deeply into academic and scientific research. During the summer vacation of his freshman year, he participated in poverty alleviation research in Jingdong, Yunnan Province. Together with team members, he conducted on-site research on the local industrial development situation in Jingdong. “During my visit, I felt the positive and optimistic attitude of the local people towards poverty alleviation, the strong support and guidance of Zhejiang University for Jingdong, and the valuable spirit of volunteers' tireless and selfless dedication. While accumulating a lot of social practical experience, I also gained a better understanding of the responsibilities of contemporary college students.” Qi shared with us.

Also, he is also a music and guitar enthusiast. "Playing the guitar is my hobby and a way for me to relax. At the same time, I have also made many like-minded friends through music, as we play music and sing together." In his four years of college life, whether it was the band performance at the New Year's Eve party or the instrumental ensemble at the Grassland Music Festival, they are all his rich and colorful explorations of life.

Performance in the 2020 New Year's Day Party

Suggestions for ZJUIers

1. Find the right track and then work hard. Dare to try what suits you and be willing to make mistakes to find the right direction. But no matter what you decide to do, you must be results-oriented, implement it in practice, and avoid giving up halfway.
2. Step out of your comfort zone and bravely try things you didn't dare to do before. Just like fitness requires enduring muscle soreness, growth is an event that occurs at the boundaries of comfort zones. Proactively doing things that make oneself "uncomfortable" can help one master new skills.
3. Do your own thing without caring about the opinions and evaluations of others. There is no need to feel anxious about what achievements your peers have achieved, nor to feel proud and complacent about what you have achieved. By only focusing on what one should do, one's heart will become calmer and more steadfast, and he will not be trapped in the mental exhaustion, nor will he waste valuable time due to meaningless anxiety and comparison.