Jingwei (Chris) Zuo — Atelier no. 01
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Jingwei Chris Zuo

A carved seal reading 左京伟

/dzwaw Jeeng-way/

Zuo Jingwei · 左京伟 · Kirkland, WA

Discipline

Agents, and the systems that carry them

Position

2nd‑year Ph.D., Computer Science
Rice University

Advisor

Dr. Yuke Wang

Before

Tsinghua University
B.Eng. & B.S.

Correspondence

jingwei.zuo [at] rice [dot] edu

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I  —  research

How to compute more with less resources?

Two literatures grew up in different rooms. One asks what a language model can be made to do — plan, use tools, argue with a copy of itself, act as one of many. The other asks what a language model costs: memory, bandwidth, latency, watts.

I work the hinge, and it turns both ways. An agent is the most expensive way yet found to use a model: every step another forward pass, every tool call another long context, every collaborator another cache.

So I work both ends — AgentVerse on the agent side, DuoAttention and MaxText on the systems side. Capability sets the ambition; cost decides which ambitions are allowed to exist.

Alongside is one answer. Every mote is a query–key pair of a causal mask. Watch what a streaming head keeps: a few sinks, a narrow window, nothing else. The text does not notice. The memory bill falls by an order of magnitude.

The card alongside is that same mask at reading scale, synchronised mote for mote.

The mask · live

dense
pairs kept528
cache sizeO(n)
mask cut, here0%
mask cut, at 32k0%
Retrieval heads keep everything — they have to go and find the needle. Streaming heads keep only a few attention sinks and a local window: 64 and 256 in the paper, four and five in this small drawing. At a 32k context that is a 98% cut in the mask, and end to end DuoAttention gives 2.1× less memory and 3.0× faster decoding with no measurable loss.

direction one

Efficient systems for AI

  • Sparse attention
  • Sparse architectures for deep learning
  • Efficient resource allocation and scheduling of deep-learning workloads

direction two

AI for efficient systems

  • Agents for kernel generation
  • Agents for building system infrastructure
  • Agent-automated LLM training
Jingwei (Chris) Zuo — AtelierPart II · publicationsKirkland, Washington

II  —  publications

Selected papers

One from each side of the hinge: many agents made to cooperate, and the attention they lean on made affordable.

01ICLR 2025

DuoAttention: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference with Retrieval and Streaming Heads

Guangxuan Xiao, Jiaming Tang, Jingwei Zuo, Junxian Guo, Shang Yang, Haotian Tang, Yao Fu, Song Han

We identify two distinct types of attention heads in large language models: retrieval heads, which require access to the full KV cache to locate relevant tokens, and streaming heads, which only need a constant-size cache. DuoAttention exploits this asymmetry to significantly reduce memory usage and decoding latency for long-context inference, while preserving model accuracy.

DuoAttention Illustration
Plate 01 — DuoAttention Illustration
02ICLR 2024

AgentVerse: Facilitating Multi-Agent Collaboration and Exploring Emergent Behaviors

Weize Chen*, Yusheng Su*, Jingwei Zuo, Cheng Yang, Chenfei Yuan, Chi-Min Chan, Heyang Yu, Yaxi Lu, Yi-Hsin Hung, Chen Qian, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou

AgentVerse is a versatile framework designed to facilitate the deployment of multiple LLM-based agents in various applications. It provides a structured pipeline for multi-agent collaboration and uncovers emergent social behaviors arising from agent interactions, offering insights into collective intelligence in LLM-based systems.

AgentVerse Illustration
Plate 02 — AgentVerse Illustration
Agents sketch the ambition; systems build the ground beneath it.

III  —  open source contribution

Code that left the desk

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”— Linus Torvalds

Each disc is one repository — area in proportion to its stars on GitHub, read live.

MaxTextGoogle Cloud / AI-Hypercomputer · Contributor · 2026

Open-source JAX framework for high-performance LLM training on TPUs and GPUs. Implemented Streaming DiLoCo for low-communication training across bandwidth-constrained datacenters.

···

DuoAttentionMIT Han Lab · Core contributor · 2023-2024

Reference implementation of DuoAttention, splitting attention heads into retrieval and streaming heads to cut long-context inference memory by 2.1x and decoding latency by 3.0x. Published at NeurIPS 2025.

···

AgentVerseOpenBMB / THUNLP · Core contributor · 2023

Framework for deploying multiple LLM-based agents in collaboration, covering reasoning, tool use, and embodied AI. Published at ICLR 2024.

···

IV  —  experiences

Where the hours went

2026.09-Present
Google

Google

Student Researcher, Google Cloud AI Research · Managed by Linfeng Song

2026.05-2026.08Seattle, WA, USA
Google

Google

SWE Intern, JAX Training Experience Team, Core ML · Google Cloud

  • Implemented Streaming DiLoCo (Distributed Low-Communication Training) in MaxText, Google Cloud's open-source JAX training framework, heavily reducing cross-datacenter (DCN) bandwidth usage while keeping convergence identical to synchronous data-parallel training.
  • Leveraged JAX, Pathways, and core Google infrastructure to build asynchronous, communication-overlapping parameter synchronization pipelines, enabling efficient training across isolated, bandwidth-constrained clusters.
  • Profiled distributed ML workloads with XProf to resolve JAX compiler sub-optimalities and system bottlenecks.
  • Ran large-scale pre-training convergence experiments comparing DiLoCo against data-parallel baselines on 7B dense and 30B MoE models across hundreds of TPU v5p chips.
  • Presented at the Google PhD Summit 2026 and TPU B3 Week Summit at the Mountain View office.
2024.12-2025.05Beijing, China
Moonshot AI

Moonshot AI

AI Infrastructure Internship · LLM Inference Team

  • Optimized LLM serving through speculative decoding, model parallelism, and effective GPU scheduling on vLLM/SGLang-like serving frameworks.
  • Analyzed CPU overhead and GPU kernel time by profiling inference systems with Nsight Systems and the PyTorch profiler.
  • Compared parallelism strategies at scale, such as data parallel + expert parallel vs. tensor parallel + expert parallel for large models across multiple nodes.
2024.07-10Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Remote Research Internship · InfiniAI Lab, advised by Prof. Beidi Chen

  • Accelerated long-context LLM inference using top-k sparse attention, supporting long-context generation with minimal latency.
  • Applied approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) to retrieve high-attention key-value pairs, reducing GPU memory overhead.
2023.10-2024.05Cambridge, MA, USA
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research Internship · Han Lab, advised by Prof. Song Han

  • Co-designed DuoAttention, a framework reducing inference memory by 2.1x and decoding latency by 3.0x for Llama-2/3 and Mistral models.
  • Devised a method applying full KV caching to retrieval heads while using a constant-length KV cache for streaming heads, enabling scalable long-context inference with negligible accuracy loss.
  • Resulted in a NeurIPS 2025 poster publication.
2023.03-09Beijing, China
Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University

Research Internship · Natural Language Processing Lab (THUNLP), advised by Prof. Zhiyuan Liu

  • Co-developed AgentVerse, a framework enabling multi-agent collaboration for reasoning, tool use, and embodied AI.
  • Validated the framework across diverse settings including reasoning, coding, and tool utilization.
  • Open-sourced the code on GitHub, where it continues to be widely used, resulting in an ICLR 2024 poster publication.

V  —  education

Rooms with blackboards

2025.09-Present

Rice University

  • Doctoral Study in Computer Science and Information Systems
2021.09-2025.6

Tsinghua University

  • B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering
  • B.S. in Fundamental Sciences (Math & Physics)
2023.09-12

Northeastern University

  • Exchange student at College of Engineering
  • Selected on Dean's list
Academic service

Reviewer — NeurIPS 2026

Artifact evaluator — PPoPP 2026

Reviewer — NeurIPS 2025

VI  —  hobbies

Four other appetites

A researcher is a person with a research problem, not a research problem with a person attached.

01

Sports

Tennis.

02

Music

Sometimes I play piano. Classical music and pop music are both my favorites.

03

Photography

At the crossing between nature and humanity. Portfolio: (Ig) chris.z_pics

04

Reading

books about sociology, psychology, and history, also novels.

Ideals

I would love to witness a world where humans obtain more convenience, harmony, and happiness. My research interest is one minute factor contributing to that grand — and probably quixotic — ideal. But the thing is: I would not like my research to go against this prospect at any time, under any circumstance.

I advocate for the open source community.

A fun fact, freely given

When I get nervous, I scratch my hair. So next time you see me doing that in a debate — you know you have got me there.

Also: one exchange semester at Northeastern in Fall 2023, which was gorgeous, and a standing habit of travelling — Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, Singapore, Australia, the US, and a great many places of interest in mainland China.

VII  —  contact

Let us have a coffee about it.

Other people's talk inspires me, and now and then my words return the favour. If we are in the same city, that is reason enough.

jingwei.zuo@rice.edu

Less is More

that is the whole of it — the rest is engineering

back to the beginning

A carved seal reading 左京伟