Biography

I am a final year PhD candidate in the Spoken Language Systems Group at MIT CSAIL, advised by Dr. James Glass, and I am actively seeking industry research positions.

My research focuses on augmented and agentic LLMs, with an emphasis on improving LLM agents' retrieval and tool-use capabilities and efficiency. I have also worked on knowledge-grounded AI, aiming to ground models in factual and structured knowledge, and I am broadly interested in generative AI and machine learning.

I hold a Master’s degree from MIT, where I worked on automatic fact verification and speech synthesis under Dr. Glass. I received my Bachelor’s degree from National Taiwan University (NTU), working on speech and language understanding with Prof. Hung-Yi Lee and Prof. Lin-Shan Lee, and computer vision with Prof. Yu-Chiang Frank Wang.

I’ve conducted research internships at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in Cambridge, MA, and twice with the NLP team at Apple in Cupertino, CA.

Interests

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Large Language Models
  • Machine Learning

Education

  • Ph.D. in EECS, 2026 (Expected)

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • S.M. in EECS, 2021

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • B.S. in Electrical Engineering, 2018

    National Taiwan University

Publications

Wei Fang , James Glass (2026). Beyond Single-Shot: Multi-step Tool Retrieval via Query Planning. Preprint.

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Wei Fang , Yang Zhang , Kaizhi Qian , James Glass , Yada Zhu (2025). PLAY2PROMPT: Zero-shot Tool Instruction Optimization for LLM Agents via Tool Play. ACL 2025 (Findings).

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Wei Fang , Yung-Sung Chuang , James Glass (2024). Joint Inference of Retrieval and Generation for Passage Re-ranking. EACL 2024 (Findings).

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Yung-Sung Chuang , Wei Fang , Shang-Wen Li , Wen-tau Yih , James Glass (2023). Expand, Rerank, and Retrieve: Query Reranking for Open-Domain Question Answering. ACL 2023 (Findings).

Code DOI

Tianhua Zhang , Hongyin Luo , Yung-Sung Chuang , Wei Fang , Luc Gaitskell , Thomas Hartvigsen , Xixin Wu , Danny Fox , Helen Meng , James Glass (2023). Interpretable Unified Language Checking. ASRU 2023.

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Wei Fang , James Glass (2021). Cross-Document Temporal Relation Extraction with Temporal Anchoring Events. Preprint.

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Wei Fang (2021). On End-to-end Automatic Fact-checking Systems. S.M. Thesis.

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Wei Fang , Moin Nadeem , Mitra Mohtarami , James Glass (2019). Neural Multi-Task Learning for Stance Prediction. FEVER 2019.

DOI

Wei Fang , Yu-An Chung , James Glass (2019). Towards Transfer Learning for End-to-End Speech Synthesis from Deep Pre-Trained Language Models. Preprint.

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Chia-Hsuan Lee , Hung-Yi Lee , Szu-Lin Wu , Chi-Liang Liu , Wei Fang , Jui-Yang Hsu , Bo-Hsiang Tseng (2019). Machine Comprehension of Spoken Content: TOEFL Listening Test and Spoken SQuAD. TASLPRO.

DOI

Moin Nadeem , Wei Fang , Brian Xu , Mitra Mohtarami , James Glass (2019). FAKTA: An Automatic End-to-End Fact Checking System. NAACL 2019.

DOI

Chung-Wei Lee , Wei Fang , Chih-Kuan Yeh , Yu-Chiang Frank Wang (2018). Multi-Label Zero-Shot Learning with Structured Knowledge Graphs. CVPR 2018.

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Wei Fang , Jui-Yang Hsu , Hung-Yi Lee , Lin-Shan Lee (2016). Hierarchical Attention Model for Improved Machine Comprehension of Spoken Content. SLT 2016.

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Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab

Jun 2024 – Aug 2024 Cambridge, MA, USA
Research Internship mentored by Dr. Yang Zhang and Dr. Yada Zhu. Worked on tool instruction optimization to improve LLM’s tool-using abilities.
 
 
 
 
 

PhD Student

MIT CSAIL

Sep 2021 – Present Cambridge, MA, USA
Research Assistant in the Spoken Language Systems group. Worked on various NLP and speech projects, including but not limited to LLMs, information retrieval, information extraction, conversational QA, factuality, and speech synthesis.
 
 
 
 
 

Masters Student

MIT CSAIL

Sep 2018 – Sep 2021 Cambridge, MA, USA
Research Assistant in Spoken Language Systems group
 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

Apple Inc

Jul 2018 – Aug 2018 Cupertino, CA, USA
Research internship with the keyboards NLP Team. Worked on generative modeling for the QuickPath project.
 
 
 
 
 

Research Intern

Apple Inc

Jun 2017 – Sep 2017 Cupertino, CA, USA
Research internship with the keyboards NLP Team. Worked on input representations for language modeling to improve user keyboard experience.
 
 
 
 
 

Undergraduate Student

National Taiwan University (NTU)

Sep 2013 – Jan 2018 Taipei, Taiwan
  • Major in Electrical Engineering
  • Undergraduate Researcher in Speech Processing & Machine Learning Lab
  • Undergraduate Researcher in Vision & Learning Lab
  • Teaching Assistant for Machine Learning, Data Analytics & Modeling, and Signal & Systems

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