Zhaopeng Tu Head of Digital Human Algorithms Tencent Hunyuan Multimodal Department tuzhaopeng@gmail.com

Bio

I currently lead the Digital Human Algorithm Team within the Tencent Hunyuan Multimodal Department. Our group focuses on the research and development of next-generation Companion Agents. Our vision is to engineer personalized, proactive, and productive AI partners that provide users with immersive and individualized experiences in a complex digital world, ultimately realizing the technological ideal of "enduring companionship, empathetic understanding".

News

• 2026-04: 6 papers were accepted to ACL2026.
• 2026-01: 4 papers were accepted to ICLR2026.
• 2025-09: 7 papers were accepted to NeurIPS2025.
• 2025-08: 2 papers were accepted to EMNLP2025.
• 2025-05: 8 papers were accepted to ACL2025.
• 2025-05: 2 papers were accepted to ICML2025.
• 2025-01: 3 papers were accepted to ICLR2025.
• 2024-10: Our GPT4Video paper was nominated for the Best Paper Award at ACM MM 2024.
• 2024-09: 3 papers (including 2 D&B Papers) were accepted to NeurIPS2024.
• 2024-09: 1 paper was accepted to EMNLP2024.
• 2024-05: 1 paper was accepted to ICML2024.
• 2024-05: 6 papers were accepted to ACL2024.
• 2024-05: 2 papers were accepted to ICLR2024.
• 2022-11: Our Adapters for MKT paper was selected as the Best Paper Award at MRL Workshop in EMNLP2022.

Selected Publications

Agents

• Bang Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Qingxuan Jiang, Peisong Wang, Jiaqi Chen, Zheng Xie, Xingyu Chen, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Yifan Yang, Zhaopeng Tu*, and Xiaolong Li. Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models. ACL 2026 (Findings). X
• Peisong Wang, Ruotian Ma, Bang Zhang, Xingyu Chen, Zhiwei He, Kang Luo, Qingsong Lv, Qingxuan Jiang, Zheng Xie, Shanyi Wang, Yuan Li, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Yifan Yang, Zhaopeng Tu*, and Xiaolong Li. RLVER: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Emotion Rewards for Empathetic Agents. ICLR 2026. X
• Zijing Zhang, Ziyang Chen, Mingxiao Li, Zhaopeng Tu*, and Xiaolong Li. RLVMR: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Meta-Reasoning Rewards for Robust Long-Horizon Agents. ICLR 2026. X
• Tian Liang, Zhiwei He, Wenxiang Jiao, Xing Wang, Yan Wang, Rui Wang, Yujiu Yang, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu. Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate. EMNLP 2024.
• Jen-tse Huang, Man Ho LAM, Eric John Li, Shujie Ren, Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Zhaopeng Tu, and Michael Lyu. Apathetic or Empathetic? Evaluating LLMs' Emotional Alignments with Humans. NeurIPS 2024.
• Jen-tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Eric John Li, Man Ho LAM, Shujie Ren, Youliang Yuan, Wenxiang Jiao, Zhaopeng Tu, and Michael Lyu. On the Humanity of Conversational AI: Evaluating the Psychological Portrayal of LLMs. ICLR 2024 (Oral, 1.2%).
• Zihao Yi, Qingxuan Jiang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Qu Yang, Mengru Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ying Shen, Zhaopeng Tu*, Xiaolong Li, and Liefeng Bo. Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains. ACL 2026 (Findings). X
• Zhengliang Shi, Yiqun Chen, Haitao Li, Weiwei Sun, Shiyu Ni, Yougang Lyu, Run-Ze Fan, Bowen Jin, Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Qiujie Xie, Xinyu Guo, Qu Yang, Jiayi Wu, Jujia Zhao, Xiaqiang Tang, Xinbei Ma, Cunxiang Wang, Jiaxin Mao, Qingyao Ai, Jen-Tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Yue Zhang, Yiming Yang, Zhaopeng Tu*, and Zhaochun Ren. Deep Research: A Systematic Survey. Preprint. X
• Xinbei Ma, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Zhengliang Shi, Mengru Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Qu Yang, Wenxuan Wang, Fanghua Ye, Qingxuan Jiang, Mengfei Zhou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Hai Zhao, Zhaopeng Tu*, Xiaolong Li, and Liefeng Bo. The Hunger Game Debate: On the Emergence of Over-Competition in Multi-Agent Systems. Preprint. X
• Zhengliang Shi, Ruotian Ma, Jen-tse Huang, Xinbei Ma, Xingyu Chen, Mengru Wang, Qu Yang, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ziyang Chen, Shanyi Wang, Cixing Li, Wenxuan Wang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Xiaolong Li, Zhaochun Ren, and Liefeng Bo. Social Welfare Function Leaderboard: When LLM Agents Allocate Social Welfare. ACL 2026 (Findings). X

Long Reasoning Models (LRMs)

• Xingyu Chen, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Zhiwei He, Jianhui Pang, Dian Yu, Linfeng Song, Qiuzhi Liu, Mengfei Zhou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Haitao Mi, and Dong Yu. Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs. ICML 2025. X
• Yue Wang, Qiuzhi Liu, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Xingyu Chen, Zhiwei He, Linfeng Song, Dian Yu, Juntao Li, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Haitao Mi, and Dong Yu. Thoughts Are All Over the Place: On the Underthinking of o1-Like LLMs. NeurIPS 2025 (Spotlight, 3.2%). X
• Zhiwei He, Tian Liang, Jiahao Xu, Qiuzhi Liu, Xingyu Chen, Yue Wang, Linfeng Song, Dian Yu, Zhenwen Liang, Wenxuan Wang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Haitao Mi, and Dong Yu. DeepMath-103K: A Large-Scale, Challenging, Decontaminated, and Verifiable Mathematical Dataset for Advancing Reasoning. ICLR 2026. X
• Zicheng Lin, Tian Liang, Jiahao Xu, Qiuzhi Liu, Xing Wang, Ruilin Luo, Chufan Shi, Siheng Li, Yujiu Yang, and Zhaopeng Tu*. Critical Tokens Matter: Token-Level Contrastive Estimation Enhances LLM's Reasoning Capability. ICML 2025. X
• Ante Wang, Linfeng Song, Ye Tian, Dian Yu, Haitao Mi, Xiangyu Duan, Zhaopeng Tu*, Jinsong Su, and Dong Yu. Don't Get Lost in the Trees: Streamlining LLM Reasoning by Overcoming Tree Search Exploration Pitfalls. ACL 2025. X
• Xiaoyuan Liu, Tian Liang, Zhiwei He, Jiahao Xu, Wenxuan Wang, Pinjia He, Zhaopeng Tu*, Haitao Mi, and Dong Yu. Trust, But Verify: A Self-Verification Approach to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards. NeurIPS 2025. X
• Mengru Wang, Xingyu Chen, Yue Wang, Zhiwei He, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Qiuzhi Liu, Yunzhi Yao, Wenxuan Wang, Ruotian Ma, Haitao Mi, Ningyu Zhang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Xiaolong Li, and Dong Yu. Two Experts Are All You Need for Steering Thinking: Reinforcing Cognitive Effort in MoE Reasoning Models Without Additional Training. NeurIPS 2025. X
• Ke Ji, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Qiuzhi Liu, Zhiwei He, Xingyu Chen, Xiaoyuan Liu, Zhijie Wang, Junying Chen, Benyou Wang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Haitao Mi, and Dong Yu. The First Few Tokens Are All You Need: An Efficient and Effective Unsupervised Prefix Fine-Tuning Method for Reasoning Models. NeurIPS 2025. X
• Yansi Li, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Xingyu Chen, Zhiwei He, Qiuzhi Liu, Rui Wang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Haitao Mi, and Dong Yu. Dancing with Critiques: Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Stepwise Natural Language Self-Critique. Preprint. X
• Yi Su, Dian Yu, Linfeng Song, Juntao Li, Haitao Mi, Zhaopeng Tu*, Min Zhang, and Dong Yu. Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding RL with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains. ACL 2026. X
• Runpeng Dai, Linfeng Song, Haolin Liu, Zhenwen Liang, Dian Yu, Haitao Mi, Zhaopeng Tu, Rui Liu, Tong Zheng, Hongtu Zhu, and Dong Yu. CDE: Curiosity-Driven Exploration for Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Models. ICLR 2026. X

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs)

• Wenxuan Wang, Xiaoyuan Liu, Kuiyi Gao, Jen-tse Huang, Youliang Yuan, Pinjia He, Shuai Wang, and Zhaopeng Tu*. Can't See the Forest for the Trees: Benchmarking Multimodal Safety Awareness for Multimodal LLMs. ACL 2025.
• Xiaoyuan Liu, Wenxuan Wang, Youliang Yuan, Jen-tse Huang, Qiuzhi Liu, Pinjia He, and Zhaopeng Tu. Insight Over Sight: Exploring the Vision-Knowledge Conflicts in Multimodal LLMs. ACL 2025.
• Wenxuan Wang, Kuiyi Gao, Youliang Yuan, Jen-tse Huang, Qiuzhi Liu, Shuai Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, and Zhaopeng Tu*. Chain-of-Jailbreak Attack for Image Generation Models via Step by Step Editing. ACL 2025 (Findings).
• Jen-Tse Huang, Dasen Dai, Jen-Yuan Huang, Youliang Yuan, Xiaoyuan Liu, Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Pinjia He, and Zhaopeng Tu*. VisFactor: Benchmarking Fundamental Visual Cognition in Multimodal Large Language Models. Preprint.
• Yue Wang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Zhengliang Shi, Wanshun Chen, Huang Liu, Jiadi Yao, Qu Yang, Qingxuan Jiang, Fanghua Ye, Juntao Li, Min Zhang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Xiaolong Li, and Liefeng Bo. BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs. ACL 2026. X
• Mingxiao Li, Na Su, Fang Qu, Zhizhou Zhong, Ziyang Chen, Yuan Li, Zhaopeng Tu*, and Xiaolong Li. VISTA: Enhancing Vision-Text Alignment in MLLMs via Cross-Modal Mutual Information Maximization. Preprint. X
• Zhanyu Wang, Longyue Wang, Zhen Zhao, Minghao Wu, Chenyang Lyu, Huayang Li, Deng Cai, Luping Zhou, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu. GPT4Video: A Unified Multimodal Large Language Model for lnstruction-Followed Understanding and Safety-Aware Generation. ACM MM 2024. [Best Paper Normination]
• Chenyang Lyu, Minghao Wu, Longyue Wang, Xinting Huang, Bingshuai Liu, Zefeng Du, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu. Macaw-LLM: Multi-Modal Language Modeling with Image, Audio, Video, and Text Integration. Preprint. [Project]

Large Language Models (LLMs)

• Wenxiang Jiao, Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Xing Wang, and Zhaopeng Tu. Is ChatGPT A Good Translator? Yes With GPT-4 As The Engine. Preprint.
• Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Jingyuan Huang, Ruyi Dai, Jen-tse Huang, Zhaopeng Tu*, and Michael R Lyu. Not All Countries Celebrate Thanksgiving: On the Cultural Dominance in Large Language Models. ACL 2024.
• Youliang Yuan, Wenxiang Jiao, Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Pinjia He, and Zhaopeng Tu. Refuse Whenever You Feel Unsafe: Improving Safety in LLMs via Decoupled Refusal Training. ACL 2025. X
• Youliang Yuan, Wenxiang Jiao, Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Pinjia He, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu. GPT-4 is too Smart to be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Cipher. ICLR 2024.
• Zhiwei He, Tian Liang, Wenxiang Jiao, Zhuosheng Zhang, Yujiu Yang, Rui Wang, Zhaopeng Tu*, Shuming Shi, and Xing Wang. Exploring Human-Like Translation Strategy with Large Language Models. TACL 2024.
• Zhiwei He, Xing Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu. Improving Machine Translation with Human Feedback: An Exploration of Quality Estimation as a Reward Model. NAACL 2024.
• Longyue Wang, Chenyang Lyu, Tianbo Ji, Zhirui Zhang, Dian Yu, Shuming Shi, and Zhaopeng Tu. Document-Level Machine Translation with Large Language Models. EMNLP 2023.
• Yifan Hou, Wenxiang Jiao, Meizhen Liu, Carl Allen, Zhaopeng Tu, and Mrinmaya Sachan. Adapters for Enhanced Modeling of Multilingual Knowledge and Text. EMNLP 2022 (Findings). [Best Paper of MRL Workshop]

Neural Machine Translation (NMT)

• Zhaopeng Tu, Yang Liu, Shuming Shi, and Tong Zhang. Learning to Remember Translation History with a Continuous Cache. TACL 2018.
• Zhaopeng Tu, Yang Liu, Lifeng Shang, Xiaohua Liu, and Hang Li. Neural Machine Translation with Reconstruction. AAAI 2017. [code]
• Zhaopeng Tu, Yang Liu, Zhengdong Lu, Xiaohua Liu, and Hang Li. Context Gates for Neural Machine Translation. TACL 2017. [code]
• Zhaopeng Tu, Zhengdong Lu, Yang Liu, Xiaohua Liu, and Hang Li. Modeling Coverage for Neural Machine Translation. ACL 2016. [code]