I am Jiahao Zhang (张家豪), a first-year PhD student in the Machine Learning Department at MBZUAI.

I work on Explainable AI (XAI) as an interactive tool for understanding and steering models, and I evaluate it in AI4Sci settings.

PhD Supervisor: Prof. Lijie Hu
Secondary Supervisor: Prof. Kun Zhang

🔥 News

2026.02: 🎉 Our paper Controlling Repetition in Protein Language Models was accepted as an ICLR 2026 Poster.
2025.08: 🎉 I joined MBZUAI as a phd student in Machine Learning Department, new start point here!

📝 Publications

Published

Controlling Repetition in Protein Language Models cover

Click cover to view abstract

Protein language models (PLMs) frequently collapse into pathological repetition during generation, which undermines structural confidence and functional viability. We present a systematic study of repetition in PLMs and propose Utility-Controlled Contrastive Steering (UCCS), which steers generation using contrastive sets that maximize repetition differences while controlling structural utility. Across ESM-3 and ProtGPT2 on CATH, UniRef50, and SCOP, UCCS reduces repetition without retraining while preserving foldability-related confidence.

Controlling Repetition in Protein Language Models

Published AI4Sci

ICLR 2026 · Poster

Jiahao Zhang^†, Zeqing Zhang^†, Di Wang, Lijie Hu^✉

PDF arXiv Code

Keywords: Protein Language Models, Reliable Protein Generation, Repetition Control

@misc{zhang2026controllingrepetitionproteinlanguage,
  title={Controlling Repetition in Protein Language Models},
  author={Jiahao Zhang and Zeqing Zhang and Di Wang and Lijie Hu},
  year={2026},
  eprint={2602.00782},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={q-bio.BM},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00782},
}

Author marks: * indicates single first author, † indicates co-first authors, and ✉ indicates corresponding author.

🚀 Projects

GlobalBrine-LithiumModel

Lead Active 2025.12-present Category: AI4Sci Topic: Brine Chemistry & Lithium Selectivity

AI4Sci Geochemistry Machine Learning Web Platform

Predictive lithium selectivity platform for brine science with map-based exploration, single-point inference, and reproducible batch jobs.

Web Code

🎖 Honors and Awards

2024.05, Cloud Computing Application Award, UCB Data Science Discovery Program.
2023 - 2024, Undergraduate Academic Excellence Scholarship.
2023.03, Second Prize, College Student Mathematics Competition (Hubei Division).
2023.01, Second Prize, Chinese Mathematics Competition.
2022.09, Third Prize, China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling.

📖 Educations

2025.08 - Present, Ph.D. in Machine Learning, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Supervisor: Prof. Lijie Hu.
2021.09 - 2025.06, B.Eng. in Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China.
2024.01 - 2024.05, Visiting Student, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.

💻 Internships

2025.01 - 2025.07, Research Assistant, Laboratory of Cell Ethology (CIS), Westlake University, Hangzhou, China.
2024.06 - 2024.12, Research Assistant, Representation Learning Lab, Westlake University, Hangzhou, China.
2024.01 - 2024.05, Data Science Research Intern, Grapedata (UC Berkeley), Berkeley, CA, USA.
2023.10 - 2023.12, Research Assistant (Remote), AI Lab (Chaowei Xiao), University of Wisconsin-Madison.

🧾 Services

Reviewer: ICML 2026
Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review (Jan 2026)
Reviewer: IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (IEEE CIM)