Zora Wang

I am currently a PhD student at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University working with Daniel Fried and Graham Neubig. I also work closely with Diyi Yang at Stanford University. My research interest is to use programmatic approaches to solve real-world tasks. Particularly, I am working on:

Computer-Use Agents for Human Work

Study "How do AI agents do human work?" & "How well does AI agent dev reflect human work?"
Build a unifying database linking AI agents and human work [ai4work]
Develop agent workers for various tasks (e.g., presentation making [AutoPresent], visual creation [VIGA]) and occupations (software engineering [ODEX], jobs across company [TAC])
Rethink the design of next-generation agents [Human-Centered Coding Agents])

Memory, Skill, and Autonomy-Adaptive Agents

Digital agents that learns navigation workflows in memory [AWM], specialized skills as actuators [ASI] [SkillWeaver], and autonomy level through interactions [PlowPilot]
Build verifiable and efficient toolboxes for math, data analysis, and visual reasoning tasks [TroVE]
These agents often facilitate human verification [TroVE] and improves task success [CowPilot]

Augmented Language Models

Tools [Survey]: designed by human experts [AutoPresent] or LMs [TroVE]; their behaviors to under-specified queries and execution failures [Fail-TaLMs]
Programs: Challenging benchmarks for open domain [ODEX], multilingual [MCoNaLa], and data science [HiTab] problems; Performant code LMs [StarCoder] [ECCO] with [Code RAG], assistive [APIs], and libraries in [DocPrompting]
Knowledge: retrieve texts [FilCo] [ReAtt] [RAGGED] and structured data [WikiTable] [TUTA]

News

Feb 2026: Released a bunch of work: (i) our position paper "Position: Humans are Missing from AI Coding Agent Research". (ii) our work on "Modeling Distinct Human Interaction in Web Agents", (iii) our study in "How Well Does AI Agent Development Reflect Real-World Work?"
Jan 2026: Proposed my PhD thesis on "Progressive Adaptation of AI Agents" 🥳
Dec 2025: Give an invited talk "How Do AI Agents Do Human Work?" at AI-TIME
Dec 2025: Organized the DL4C Workshop at NeurIPS, featuring "Deep Learning for Code in the Agentic Era"
Nov 2025: Give an invited talk "How Do AI Agents Do Human Work?" at Ploutos Fireside Chat
Oct 2025: Excited to be awarded the Google PhD Fellowship!
Sep 2025: Give a guest lecture for Human-Centered NLP about language model-based agents [slides]

🐾 Older News

Jul 2025: Give a talk about "Building Memory- and Skill-Adaptive Agents" at Renmin University of China (RUC) [slides] [poster]

Jun 2025: Give two talks about "Building Memory- and Skill-Adaptive Agents" [slides] and "Rethinking Human's Role in Building Better Agents" [slides] in SF 🔅

May 2025: Started as a Visiting Student Researcher at Stanford NLP Group working with Diyi Yang. Happy to meet new/old friends! 😃

Apr 2025: Released two new works on agent skill induction via online adaptation [ASI]😎 and offline exploration [SkillWeaver].

Apr 2025: Gave an tutorial at the 2nd CMU Agent Workshop about "Language Model-Based Agents" [slides]

Mar 2025: Gave an invited talk at the Advancing LLM-Based Multi-Agent Collaboration Workshop [slides]

Mar 2025: Gave two talks at AAAI Web Agent Revolution Workshop, about Agent Workflow Memory and The Agent Company.

Jan 2025: Check out the podcast episode about interesting discussions✨ around "Agent Workflow Memory" [link]

Dec 2024: Gave a talk at Tsinghua University about "From Workflows to Tools: Building Adaptive Agents On the Fly" (slides)

Nov 2024: Gave a talk at UIUC iSE Seminar about "Solving Real-World Tasks via Program Generation". Feel free to check out my slides here.

Oct 2024: Joined the panelist of Our CS (Workshop for Undergraduates in CS) and shared some of my thoughts about research

Sep 2024: Gave an invited talk at Camel-AI 🐪 about Agent Workflow Memory, check out the video, paper, and tweet

Jul 2024: Gave a tutorial at SIGIR about Large Language Models for Tabular Data, check out the slides & recordings if you're interested!

May 2024: Organized our CMU Agent Workshop 🤖 with plenty of events -- insightful tutorials, talks, and posters! I also gave two (short) tutorials about tool-augmented LMs and codegen testbeds.

Mar 2024: Gave a guest lecture about "Language Agents and Tool Use" at the Advanced NLP course (11-711) course, check out the recordings!

Mar 2024: Gave a talk at the [FLAME_ (Foundation and LAnguage Model) 🔥] seminar, about [our recent survey] and [TroVE]

Feb 2024: Gave a talk about Language Models with Tools at the LLM as Agent Seminar, about [TroVE] and works in progress 🤫

Feb 2024: Gave a lecture about Evaluation (metrics and benchmarks) for the Neural Code Generation (11-891) course 💻

Jan 2024: TAing for the new course [11-891 Neural Code Generation], reach out if you want to discuss more project ideas 🪄

Nov 2023: Gave a guest lecture about Evaluation and Benchmarks for Code Generation for the Advanced NLP course (11-711) 👩‍🏫 more details [here]

Aug 2023: A talk about 🛠️ Tool using, learning, and making with LLMs at Code Generation Reading Group, check out the [video]

Apr 2023: Gave a talk about [ODEX] at the Machine Learning Methods in Software Engineering (video) hosted by JetBrains Research Team 👩‍💻

Get Connected

Undergrad & Master's Students: If you want to explore research opportunities with me (application form) or ask about CMU application (check out GASP), my office hours are available every Friday 4-5 pm EST. Email me to reserve a time!

Startups: If you have a particular collaboration in mind, shoot me your thoughts! I also take a limited number of paid advisory engagements. Due to volumn, I may not be able to reply to all emails.

Fellow Researchers: Always happy to connect over ideas - just email me!

Upcoming Events

Mar 2026: Will give two talk on "AI Agents at Work - But Whose Work?" at Toronton Data Workshop and Snorkel AI
Mar 2026: Will give a lecture on AI Agents for Advanced NLP course at CMU
Mar 2026: Will give a lecture on "Code-Writing Assistants" for LLM Applications course at CMU
Jul 2026: Will give a tutorial on the "Future of Work in the Age of LLMs" at ACL 2026, see u in San Diego!

My Recent Favorite Publications

How Well Does AI Agent Development Reflect Real-World Work?

Zora Zhiruo Wang, Sanidhya Vijayvargiya, Aspen Chen, Hanmo Zhang, Venu Arvind Arangarajan, Jett Chen, Valerie Chen, Diyi Yang, Daniel Fried, Graham Neubig

Preprint