RESEARCH / LANGUAGE / LEARNING

chenlong zhang张晨龙

I'm Chenlong (Charlie) Zhang, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), advised by Zhen Dong. My research focuses on reinforcement learning and coding agents.

My research experience includes internships at Qwen and ByteDance Seed. I received my M.S. from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in June 2026, and previously worked with Xiang Yue at Carnegie Mellon University.

Research interests: Agentic RL · Coding Agents · RL Scaling

Chenlong Zhang
chenlong / charlie

selected publications01—05 / 2024—2026

NeurIPS 2025

RULE: Reinforcement Unlearning Achieves Forget-retain Pareto Optimality

Chenlong Zhang, Zhuoran Jin, Hongbang Yuan, Jiaheng Wei, Tong Zhou, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Yubo Chen

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We propose RULE, an on-policy RL-based unlearning framework that performs refusal boundary optimization using only 12% forget data and 8% synthetic queries. We introduce the concept of "naturalness" as a novel evaluation dimension. Experimental results demonstrate that RULE achieves Pareto-optimal trade-offs between forgetting and utility.

NAACL 2025

DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization

Chenlong Zhang, Tong Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao

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We introduce DTELS, a task for timeline summarization with controllable granularity levels. Alongside, we release the DTELS-Bench dataset containing 543 topics and 55k articles annotated at three granularity levels. We further propose event-centric evaluation metrics and reveal that existing LLMs struggle with maintaining temporal consistency across granularities.

COLING 2024

Continual Few-shot Event Detection via Hierarchical Augmentation Networks

Chenlong Zhang, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Mengshu Sun, Jun Zhao

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We introduce Continual Few-shot Event Detection (CFED), a challenging task that requires continual learning of event detection with limited exemplars. To address this, we present HANet, a hierarchical augmentation network for continual few-shot event detection. By leveraging one-exemplar learning and contrastive augmentation, HANet achieves up to +8.4% micro-F1 improvement over prior methods, outperforming both full model retraining and GPT-3.5-based baselines.

News

Received my M.S. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Interplay accepted as a Spotlight paper at ICML 2026.

MMR-Life accepted to ICLR 2026.

Earlier updates
2025.11

Awarded the National Scholarship of China (top 0.2% nationwide) by the Ministry of Education.

2025.09

RULE: Reinforcement Unlearning Achieves Forget-retain Pareto Optimality was accepted to NeurIPS 2025 (Main).

2025.02

DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization was accepted to NAACL 2025 (Main).

2019~2023

Awarded the National Scholarship of China (top 0.2% nationwide) by the Ministry of Education ✖️ 3 times.

Education

University of California,
Santa Barbara

Ph.D. student in Computer Science
Advised by Zhen Dong

Institute of Automation,
Chinese Academy of Sciences

M.S. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems
GPA 3.82 / 4.0
Advised by Yubo Chen and Jun Zhao

Henan University

B.S. in Software Engineering
GPA 3.87 / 4.0 · Rank 1 / 388

Research experience

ByteDance Seed

Intern · Reinforcement learning for coding agents

Qwen, Alibaba

Intern · Post-training
Reward-hacking monitors for coding-agent RL

Carnegie Mellon University

Language Technologies Institute · Research Intern
Advised by Xiang Yue and Graham Neubig

HKUST (Guangzhou)

Research Intern · Advised by Jiaheng Wei

NLPR, Institute of Automation, CAS

Research Intern · Advised by Pengfei Cao

Honors & awards
  • Dec. 2025 China National Scholarship (Top 0.2% nationwide), Ministry of Education
  • May 2024 Merit Student, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • Jun. 2023 Outstanding Graduate, Provincial Education Department
  • Jun. 2023 Excellent Bachelor's Thesis Award, Henan University
  • Dec. 2022 China National Scholarship (Top 0.2% nationwide), Ministry of Education
  • Apr. 2022 Excellent Completion, National Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program (Project Leader)
  • Dec. 2021 China National Scholarship (Top 0.2% nationwide), Ministry of Education
  • Jan. 2021 Bluesky Scholarship (Top 0.5%), Henan University
  • Dec. 2020 China National Scholarship (Top 0.2% nationwide), Ministry of Education
Academic service
  • Task Organizer, SemEval 2026: Abductive Event Reasoning: Towards Real-World Event Causal Inference for Large Language LLMs
  • Task Organizer, CCKS 2025: Event Timeline Generation for Social Media
Beyond research
  • Basketball and music take up a big part of my free time.
  • I enjoy English rock, including Pink Floyd and Yes. Music recommendations are always welcome.
© 2026 Chenlong Zhangvisual theme inspired by OK Computer