Qirui (Sara) Zheng

Qirui "Sara" Zheng

Undergrad, UC San Diego
Data Science and Cognitive Science Spec. ML and Neural Computations
Email: q7zheng [at] ucsd [dot] edu

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My previous research focused on the development of a retrieval-augmented language model (RAG) for the task of open-domain question answering, from self trained state space model (Mamba-2 130M & 1.3B).

Publications

Single-Pass Document Scanning for Question Answering
Weili Cao*, Jianyou Wang*, Youze Zheng, Longtian Bao, Qirui Zheng, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Ramamohan Paturi, Leon Bergen
arXiv Preprint, 2025
TL;DR: We trained State Space Models (Mamba-2) for long-context Q&A, achieving performance comparable to GPT-4o on extremely long documents while being more computationally efficient.
@inproceedings{cao2025singlepassdocumentscanning, title={Single-Pass Document Scanning for Question Answering}, author={Cao, Weili and Wang, Jianyou and Zheng, Youze and Bao, Longtian and Zheng, Qirui and Berg-Kirkpatrick, Taylor and Paturi, Ramamohan and Bergen, Leon}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)}, year={2025}, }
How Novices Use Program Visualizations to Understand Code that Manipulates Data Tables
Ylesia Wu*, Qirui Zheng*, Sam Lau
Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE TS 25), ACM, 2025
TL;DR: A case study on how novices use program visualizations to understand code manipulating data tables, revealing the importance of visualizations in learning programming.
@inproceedings{wu2025novices, title={How Novices Use Program Visualizations to Understand Code that Manipulates Data Tables}, author={Wu, Ylesia and Zheng, Qirui and Lau, Sam}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1}, pages={1267--1273}, year={2025} }