Qizhen (Irene) Zhang

Qizhen Zhang (Irene)

I am a PhD student at the University of Oxford, interested in large language model research across all stages of training. Previously, I interned as a research scientist in Meta’s core Llama team and FAIR. Before my PhD, I worked full-time at Cohere doing research and building some of the first 100B+ parameter models ever in early 2022. I wrote my Master’s thesis on cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute.

01

Selected research

* indicates equal contribution or joint last authors

Pretraining data & training dynamics

Pretraining model surgery

Multi-agent reinforcement learning

02

Experience

2025

Research Scientist Intern

Meta FAIR · Menlo Park, USA

Llama pretraining team / FAIR / MSL

2024—2025

Research Scientist Intern

Meta GenAI · New York City, USA

Llama post-training team

2023—2024

Research Scientist Intern (Part-time)

Cohere · London, United Kingdom

Pretraining team

2022

Member of Technical Staff

Cohere · Toronto, Canada

Built LLM pretraining frameworks using JAX & TPUs. Co-owned pretraining runs of O(100 Billion) parameters.