PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Junbo Zhao

Also known as Jake Zhao, 赵俊博

Junbo Zhao, also known as Jake, is a researcher whose work runs from generative adversarial networks to diffusion language models. A PhD graduate of New York University under Yann LeCun, he coauthored the Energy-based Generative Adversarial Network (EBGAN) in 2016 and the adversarially regularized autoencoder in 2018. At Zhejiang University, he coauthored PiCO, which received an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICLR 2022, and led the TableGPT project for tabular data in 2024. In December 2025, he was an author of LLaDA2.0, a family of diffusion language models scaled to 100 billion total parameters, and QbitAI named him its 2025 AI Person of the Year. He is an Assistant Professor at Zhejiang University and a Director at Ant Group, and he spearheads the LLaDA 2.X series.

Timeline

  1. 2015–2016

    Character ConvNets and EBGAN

    In 2015, he coauthors "Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification" with Xiang Zhang and Yann LeCun, an empirical study of character-level ConvNets for text classification. In 2016, he, Michael Mathieu and LeCun, of New York University's Department of Computer Science and Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, introduce the Energy-based Generative Adversarial Network (EBGAN), which views the discriminator as an energy function. He earns his PhD at New York University under LeCun.

  2. 2018

    Adversarially regularized autoencoders

    The adversarially regularized autoencoder (ARAE), written with Yoon Kim, Kelly Zhang, Alexander M. Rush and LeCun, appears at ICML 2018. It trains deep latent variable models of discrete structures such as text sequences.

  3. 2022

    PiCO's ICLR honorable mention

    With coauthors including Haobo Wang and Gang Chen of Zhejiang University and Gang Niu of RIKEN AIP, he writes "PiCO: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Partial Label Learning", which receives an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICLR 2022. PiCO combines a contrastive learning module with a class prototype-based label disambiguation algorithm.

  4. 2023–2024

    TableGPT for tabular data

    In July 2023, he coauthors TableGPT with Liangyu Zha, Haobo Wang, Gang Chen and others, a fine-tuned framework that lets language models understand and operate on tables through external functional commands. In November 2024, he is a coauthor of TableGPT2, a model pre-trained and fine-tuned with over 593.8K tables and 2.36M high-quality query-table-output tuples. In 2024, he leads the TableGPT project, which covers TableGPT2 and R1 and passes 200,000 downloads.

  5. 2023–2024

    A Zhejiang science prize

    The Zhejiang Province Science and Technology Progress First Prize goes to him for 2023 and for 2024.

  6. 2025

    LLaDA2.0 at 100 billion parameters

    In December 2025, researchers from Ant Group, Renmin University of China, Zhejiang University and Westlake University release LLaDA2.0, a tuple of discrete diffusion language models that scales to 100B total parameters, and he is among its authors. QbitAI names him its 2025 AI Person of the Year.

  7. 2026

    The LLaDA 2.X series

    As part of the LLaDA 2.X series that he spearheads, LLaDA2.1 arrives in February 2026 and adds Token-to-Token editing to the Mask-to-Token decoding of LLaDA2.0. LLaDA 2.0-Uni, a unified multimodal diffusion language model, follows in April 2026, and LLaDA 2.2, an agentic diffusion language model, in July 2026.

  8. As of October 2026

    Zhejiang University and Ant Group

    He is an Assistant Professor at Zhejiang University, in its 100-Young Professor Program, and a Director at Ant Group. Current work covers scaling of world models and embodied AI, diffusion language models, and data strategies such as synthesis and distillation.

Career

  1. NowZhejiang UniversityAssistant Professor
  2. NowAnt GroupDirector

Education

  1. New York UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Zhejiang University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  2. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Zhejiang University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  3. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Zhejiang University. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Zhejiang University. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Junbo Zhao yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. [1509.01626] Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. [1609.03126] Energy-based Generative Adversarial Network arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. [1609.03126] Energy-based Generative Adversarial Networks ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Junbo Zhao (Jake) jzhao2024.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. [1706.04223] Adversarially Regularized Autoencoders arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. ICLR 2022 Awards iclr.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention at ICLR 2022 | Center for Advanced Intelligence Project aip.riken.jp. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. [2307.08674] TableGPT: Towards Unifying Tables, Nature Language and Commands into One GPT arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. [2411.02059] TableGPT2: A Large Multimodal Model with Tabular Data Integration arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. LLaDA2.0: Scaling Up Diffusion Language Models to 100B arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. [2602.08676] LLaDA2.1: Speeding Up Text Diffusion via Token Editing arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.