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Bio, Work & Ideas

Yuxuan Zhang

Conference affiliation: Z.ai · 2025

Yuxuan Zhang is an algorithm engineer at Z.ai building the open-source GLM ecosystem, including language models, multimodal systems, and software agents. His work addresses the practical requirements behind capable AI: training models on real codebases, evaluating complete agent workflows, scaling reinforcement learning, and deploying large open models.

Earlier, Zhang earned national-level awards in RoboMaster and China’s National Students’ SmartCar Competition and contributed to Langchain-Chatchat and chatpdf. He is pursuing a PhD at the University of Liverpool and is a visiting PhD researcher at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence.

At Z.ai, his contributions span GLM-5, GLM-V, CogVideoX, CogAgent, and Open-AutoGLM. He is a named contributor to the GLM-5 technical report. At AI Engineer Code 2025, he described a GLM ecosystem that had surpassed 100 million downloads and detailed the engineering behind GLM-4.6.

  • Evaluate coding agents as complete systems. Zhang highlighted CC-Bench, which assesses frontend development, internal tools, data analysis, and algorithms while recording planning, tool calls, code edits, and execution.
  • Teach models to navigate actual repositories. GLM-4.6’s training builds from approximately 15 trillion general-pretraining tokens toward code and reasoning data, interconnected files, issues, pull requests, long-context examples, and complete agent trajectories.
  • Match reinforcement-learning architecture to the workload. The open slime framework combines SGLang inference with Megatron-based training. Short reasoning tasks benefit from synchronized updates; asynchronous agent reinforcement learning lets slower environments feed a shared buffer without blocking training. Zhang also emphasizes curriculum difficulty, token-level optimization, and expert-verified data.
  • Give multimodal agents usable real-world context. GLM-V preserves native image dimensions for screenshots and slides, while temporal index tokens help video models track event order. Open-AutoGLM extends these capabilities into phone-based interaction. In a Z.ai community discussion, Zhang also clarified that deploying a 355-billion-parameter model at FP8 requires substantial memory beyond model weights, including capacity for the key-value cache.

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Key ideas

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Building a coding agent takes more than stronger benchmark scores: it requires repository-aware training, realistic workflow evaluation and reinforcement learning that tolerates slow tools.

  • What grows around an open model?
    0:18 ↗
  • Task scores and user preference measure different things
    2:20 ↗
  • Evaluate the coding workflow, not just the answer
    3:36 ↗
  • From general text to connected repositories
    5:15 ↗
  • Keep slow agent tasks from stopping RL training
    7:51 ↗
  • Increase difficulty without shortening the reasoning budget
    11:00 ↗
  • Loss weighting and data quality change what RL rewards
    12:51 ↗
  • Preserve image geometry and video order
    14:06 ↗
  • Run the weights or use hosted access
    16:02 ↗
  • Continue from model access to implementation
    18:29 ↗

References