About me
I am a Senior Research Scientist at Google based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Previously, I did my DPhil (the Oxford way of saying PhD) in the Machine Learning Research Group, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford.
Academic Services
Area chair/senior program committee member at NeurIPS (2024-25), ICML (2025), ACL ARR (2025-); Action editor at TMLR.
Reviewer/program committee member at ACL (2023-24), AutoML-Conf (2023-24), COLM (2024), CVPR (2024), ECCV (2024), EMNLP (2023-24), ICLR (2024-25), ICML (2023-24), JMLR, Machine Learning, NeurIPS (2022-23), WACV (2022-24), etc.
Interests
- Large language models
- Bayesian optimization
- Automated machine learning (AutoML)
- Machine learning on graphs
Education
-
DPhil (PhD), Machine Learning, 2019 - 2023
University of Oxford
-
BA, MEng, Engineering Science. First-class Honours, 2015 - 2019
University of Oxford
Recent News
💡 Preprint: VPRL
We propose Visual Planning via Reinforcement Learning (VPRL), which significantly boosted planning capabilities in pure vision-based models with reinforcement learning post-training.
📄 Astute RAG accepted at ACL 2025
Astute RAG was accepted at ACL 2025 as a main paper!
💡 Preprint: Automating multi-agent designs
Our new work on automating prompt and topology design in multi-agent LLM systems is now available as an arXiv preprint!
📄 ICLR acceptance: Self-improving long-context reasoners
Our work, From Few to Many: Self-Improving Many-Shot Reasoners Through Iterative Optimization and Generation, was accepted at ICLR 2025.
Featured
Publications
View all listed publications or view by tags. For a complete list including preprints & working papers, refer to my Google Scholar.
(2025).
Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models.
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (to appear).
(2025).
Visual Planning: Let's Think Only with Images.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.11409.
(2025).
Reasoning-SQL: Reinforcement Learning with SQL Tailored Partial Rewards for Reasoning-Enhanced Text-to-SQL.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.23157.
(2025).
From Few to Many: Self-Improving Many-Shot Reasoners Through Iterative Optimization and Generation.
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
(2025).
Multi-Agent Design: Optimizing Agents with Better Prompts and Topologies.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.02533.
(2024).
Teach Better or Show Smarter? On Instructions and Exemplars in Automatic Prompt Optimization.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
(2024).
UQE: A Query Engine for Unstructured Databases.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
(2024).
Bayesian Optimization of Functions over Node Subsets in Graphs.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).
Contact
- xingchenw [at] google.com
- 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA, 94043