PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yinger Zhang

Yinger Zhang is an AI researcher on Alibaba Group's Qwen team whose work spans lensless imaging, mixture-of-experts models and language model agents. They earned a B.E. from Zhejiang University, worked as a research assistant at the National University of Singapore, and held research roles at Ant Group and Qwen. In 2024, they coauthored MoDE and Reverse Chain, completed a Ph.D. at Zhejiang University in 2025, and coauthored the Qwen3 Technical Report. Their 2026 papers DeepPlanning and OccuBench evaluated long-horizon planning and AI agents on professional tasks.

Now at
Alibaba
Badges

Timeline

  1. 2019–2020

    NUS research and a degree

    From June to September 2019, they work as a research assistant in the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. They earn a B.E. from Zhejiang University's College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering in 2020.

  2. October 2021–December 2021

    Quark Medical search

    In October 2021, they join Alibaba Group as an ML engineer intern and work on an interactive search engine for Quark Medical.

  3. 2022

    Lensless text recognition

    In 2022, they coauthor a paper on text detection and recognition based on a lensless imaging system.

  4. November 2022–November 2023

    Research at Ant Group

    From November 2022 to November 2023, they work as a research intern at Ant Group.

  5. December 2023–May 2024

    Visiting scholar at NUS

    From December 2023 to May 2024, they work as a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore.

  6. 2024–2025

    MoDE and Reverse Chain

    In 2024, they coauthor MoDE, which uses mutual distillation to help mixture-of-experts learn features from one another. Their Reverse Chain paper, also published in 2024, uses prompts and backward reasoning to guide LLMs through multi-API calls. They work as an ML engineer intern on Alibaba Group's Qwen team from May 2024 to May 2025.

  7. 2025

    A Zhejiang PhD and Qwen3

    In 2025, they complete a Ph.D. at Zhejiang University and coauthor the Qwen3 Technical Report. The report presents a Qwen model family with dense and mixture-of-experts language models.

  8. As of October 2026

    Researcher on Alibaba's Qwen team

    In 2026, they coauthor DeepPlanning, a benchmark for long-horizon planning through multi-day travel and multi-product shopping tasks. They also coauthor OccuBench, which evaluates agents on 100 professional task scenarios across 10 industries and 65 specialized domains. As of October 2026, they are a researcher on Alibaba Group's Qwen team, where their research focuses on LLM agents.

Career

  1. Since 2021AlibabaML engineer intern
  2. 2022–2023Ant GroupResearch intern
  3. 2019–2024National University of SingaporeResearch Assistant, Visiting scholar

Education

  1. 2025Zhejiang UniversityPh.D.
  2. 2020Zhejiang UniversityB.E.

From the biography.

  1. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Yinger Zhang. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  2. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Yinger Zhang. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  3. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Alibaba. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.
  4. Universities (31%) and startups and other companies (25%) employ the largest shares of 2020–2026 entrantsIncludes Alibaba. Among 819 people whose first recorded role started in 2020–2026 and who have a known current organization, 60% work in commercial sectors (25% at startups and other companies, 23% at frontier labs and 13% at big tech, with 9 in two), and 31% work at universities, compared with 66% for earlier entrants.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. About me - Zhang Yinger zhangyingerjelly.github.io. Checked 20 October 2026.
  2. MoDE: A Mixture-of-Experts Model with Mutual Distillation among the Experts | Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence ojs.aaai.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  3. Reverse Chain: A Generic-Rule for LLMs to Master Multi-API Planning - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  4. Qwen3 Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  5. DeepPlanning: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Agentic Planning with Verifiable Constraints - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 20 October 2026.
  6. OccuBench: Evaluating AI Agents on Real-World Professional Tasks via Language World Models arxiv.org. Checked 20 October 2026.