I am a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. My recent research focuses on large-scale natural language processing and multimodal learning, which includes:

• LLM distillation and adaptation [1, 2, 3, 4]
• LLM test-time scaling [5, 6, 7]
• Building specialized foundation models [8, 9, 10, 11, 12]

Publications [ Selected (9) | Full (69) | Google Scholar ]

• 2024BiomedCLIP: a multimodal biomedical foundation model pretrained from fifteen million scientific image-text pairs NEJM AI
  Sheng Zhang^*, Yanbo Xu^*, Naoto Usuyama, Hanwen Xu, Jaspreet Bagga, Robert Tinn, Sam Preston, Rajesh Rao, Mu Wei, Naveen Valluri, Cliff Wong, Andrea Tupini, Yu Wang, Matt Mazzola, Swadheen Shukla, Lars Liden, Jianfeng Gao, Angela Crabtree, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Matthew P. Lungren, Tristan Naumann, Sheng Wang, Hoifung Poon (^*equal contribution)
  [ Model | Data ]
• 2023LLaVA-Med: Training a Large Language-and-Vision Assistant for Biomedicine in One Day NeurIPS 2023 (Spotlight)
  Chunyuan Li^*, Cliff Wong^*, Sheng Zhang^*, Naoto Usuyama, Haotian Liu, Jianwei Yang, Tristan Naumann, Hoifung Poon, Jianfeng Gao (^*equal contribution)
  [ Project page ]
• 2026OctoMed: Data Recipes for State-of-the-Art Multimodal Medical Reasoning CVPR 2026
  Timothy Ossowski^*, Sheng Zhang^*, Qianchu Liu, Guanghui Qin, Reuben Tan, Tristan Naumann, Junjie Hu, Hoifung Poon (^*equal contribution)
  [ Model | Blog | Data ]
• 2026Be My Eyes: Extending Large Language Models to New Modalities Through Multi-Agent Collaboration
  James Y. Huang^*, Sheng Zhang^*, Qianchu Liu, Guanghui Qin, Tinghui Zhu, Tristan Naumann, Muhao Chen, Hoifung Poon (^*equal contribution)
  [ Blog ]
• 2023Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine
  Harsha Nori^*, Yin Tat Lee^*, Sheng Zhang^*, Dean Carignan, Richard Edgar, Nicolo Fusi, Nicholas King, Jonathan Larson, Yuanzhi Li, Weishung Liu, Renqian Luo, Scott Mayer McKinney, Robert Osazuwa Ness, Hoifung Poon, Tao Qin, Naoto Usuyama, Chris White, Eric Horvitz (^*equal contribution)
  [ Blog | Code ]
• 2024A whole-slide foundation model for digital pathology from real-world data Nature
  Hanwen Xu, Naoto Usuyama, Jaspreet Bagga, Sheng Zhang, Rajesh Rao, Tristan Naumann, Cliff Wong, Zelalem Gero, Javier González, Yu Gu, Yanbo Xu, Mu Wei, Wenhui Wang, Shuming Ma, Furu Wei, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao, Jaylen Rosemon, Tucker Bower, Soohee Lee, Roshanthi Weerasinghe, Bill J. Wright, Ari Robicsek, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Sheng Wang, Hoifung Poon
  [ Model | Data ]
• 2026Multimodal AI generates virtual population for tumor microenvironment modeling Cell
  Jeya Maria Jose Valanarasu, Hanwen Xu, Naoto Usuyama, Chanwoo Kim, Cliff Wong, Peniel Argaw, Racheli Ben Shimol, Angela Crabtree, Kevin Matlock, Alexandra Q. Bartlett, Jaspreet Bagga, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Tristan Naumann, Bernard A. Fox, Bill Wright, Ari Robicsek, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Sheng Wang, Hoifung Poon
• 2024UniversalNER: Targeted Distillation from Large Language Models for Open Named Entity Recognition ICLR 2024
  Wenxuan Zhou^*, Sheng Zhang^*, Yu Gu, Muhao Chen, Hoifung Poon (^*equal contribution)
  [ Demo | Model | MSR Podcast ]
• 2019AMR Parsing as Sequence-to-Graph Transduction ACL 2019 Best Paper Nominee
  Sheng Zhang, Xutai Ma, Kevin Duh, Benjamin Van Durme
  [ Code | BibTex ]

Tutorials

• 2023Precision Health in the Age of Large Language Models KDD 2023
  Hoifung Poon, Tristan Naumann, Sheng Zhang, Javier González
  [ Webpage | Blog ]

Service

• Area Chair: NeurIPS 2023; ARR; ACL 2024; NAACL 2021, 2024; EMNLP 2022; IJCNLP-AACL 2023
• Tutorial: KDD 2023
• Organizer: Workshop on COmmonsense INference in NLP (COIN) at EMNLP 2019
• (S)PC Member/Reviewer: ACL 2017-2023; EMNLP 2018-2021; AAAI 2020-2024; CVPR 2025; ICCV 2023-2025; NAACL 2018-2021; EACL 2017, 2021; AACL-IJCNLP 2020; COLM 2024; COLING 2020; CoNLL 2019; IJCNLP 2017; IWCS 2017; TACL; Computational Linguistics; ARR; BMC Bioinformatics; NLE