👋 I am James Zhao, a third-year PhD candidate in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. I am co-advised by Prof. Bryan Hooi and Prof. See-Kiong Ng. Recently, I am interested in the efficiency of long-horizon agentic tasks and test-time scaling. I always welcome discussions and collaborations, please feel free to reach out! 😃

I am also seeking research internship opportunities. If you have an open position that may be a good fit, I would be happy to connect.

Selected Publications

FineVerify: Scaling Test-Time Compute with Fine-Grained Self-Verification for Agentic Search EMNLP 2026

James Xu Zhao, Hui Chen, Bryan Hooi, See-Kiong Ng

[Paper] [Code]

Test-Time Scaling in Reasoning Models Is Not Effective for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks Yet COLM 2026

James Xu Zhao, Bryan Hooi, See-Kiong Ng

[Paper] [Code]

How Does Response Length Affect Long-Form Factuality ACL 2025 Findings

James Xu Zhao, Jimmy Z.J. Liu, Bryan Hooi, See-Kiong Ng

[Paper] [Code]

Automatic Model Selection with Large Language Models for Reasoning EMNLP2023 Findings

James Xu Zhao, Yuxi Xie, Kenji Kawaguchi, Junxian He, Qizhe Xie

[Paper] [Code]