From 2017, Mengyu Zhou is a researcher at Microsoft Research Asia. He is currently a Principal Researcher at DKI (Data, Knowledge, Intelligence) Group. His current research interests are: Data analytics, natural language processing, large language model reasoning and post-training, network science and neuroscience. His research work supports the core Microsoft products, for example: Domain-specific LLM training in Excel Copilot, semantic data analytics in Excel spreadsheet intelligence, and the design and implementation of Forms Ideas AI system.

From 2008 to 2012, Mengyu was an undergraduate at Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. From 2012 to 2017, he was a PhD student at Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) and a member of Netman Group at Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University. His advisors were Thomas Moscibroda and Dan Pei. His PhD work uses big data science & machine learning for characterizing campus life including WiFi experience, social-physical interactions and education. Mengyu is the founder of two science and technology related student organizations at Tsinghua: Lab μ Geek Association and Club ε Neuroscience Interest Group. In Lab μ, he led the > 50-people team on the design, development and promotion of 3 popular products — TUNet automatic network manager, Tsinghua Now campus life assistant and CaμsKit large event services.

Products

  • Excel Copilot

    Excel Copilot

    Copilot in Excel helps you do more with your data by generating formula column suggestions, showing insights in charts and PivotTables, and highlighting interesting data.

  • Excel Ideas

    Excel Ideas

    Core component of Microsoft Excel which supports major UX by table detection and understanding, semantic recognition and automatic data analyses and insights recommendations.

  • Forms Ideas

    Forms Ideas

    The AI system on survey distribution, response collection and data analysis in Microsoft Forms, which boosts the experiences of survey designers by data analytics and machine learning.

  • TUNet

    TUNet

    Mobile tool app for the campus network of Tsinghua, which automatically helps students to login, manage and protect their campus network accounts, etc. on their mobile devices.

  • Tsinghua Now

    Tsinghua Now

    Mobile helper app for campus life at Tsinghua, which presents prioritized information card flow to notify students about deadlines, course schedules and announcements.

  • CaμsKit

    CaμsKit

    Toolkit for large performances (such as student festivals). It consists of deployment of enterprise WLAN (WiFi Network), WeChat wall, lottery page and Danmaku system.

Publications

TableLoRA: Low-rank Adaptation on Table Structure Understanding for Large Language Models
Xinyi He, Yihao Liu, Mengyu Zhou, Yeye He, Haoyu Dong, Shi Han, Zejian Yuan, Dongmei Zhang
ACL 2025, Vienna, Austria, July 2025.

Paper

TablePilot: Recommending Human-Preferred Tabular Data Analysis with Large Language Models
Deyin Yi, Yihao Liu, Lang Cao, Mengyu Zhou, Haoyu Dong, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
ACL 2025, Vienna, Austria, July 2025.

Paper

PromptIntern: Saving Inference Costs by Internalizing Recurrent Prompt during Large Language Model Fine-tuning
Jiaru Zou, Mengyu Zhou, Tao Li, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
EMNLP 2024, Miami, Florida, USA, November 2024.

Paper

CoCoST: Automatic Complex Code Generation with Online Searching and Correctness Testing
Xinyi He, Jiaru Zou, Yun Lin, Mengyu Zhou, Shi Han, Zejian Yuan, Dongmei Zhang
EMNLP 2024, Miami, Florida, USA, November 2024.

Paper

Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models
Haoyu Dong, Yuzhang Tian, Jianbo Zhao, Junyu Xiong, Mengyu Zhou, Yun Lin, José Cambronero, Yeye He, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
EMNLP 2024, Miami, Florida, USA, November 2024.

Paper

TAP4LLM: Table Provider on Sampling, Augmenting, and Packing Semi-structured Data for Large Language Model Reasoning
Yuan Sui, Jiaru Zou, Mengyu Zhou, Xinyi He, Lun Du, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
EMNLP 2024, Miami, Florida, USA, November 2024.

Paper

Vision Language Models for Spreadsheet Understanding: Challenges and Opportunities
Shiyu Xia, Junyu Xiong, Haoyu Dong, Jianbo Zhao, Yuzhang Tian, Mengyu Zhou, Yeye He, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
ALVR 2024, Bangkok, Thailand, August 2024.

Paper

Table Meets LLM: Can Large Language Models Understand Structured Table Data? A Benchmark and Empirical Study
Yuan Sui, Mengyu Zhou, Mingjie Zhou, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
WSDM 2024, Mérida, Yucatán, México, March 2024.

Paper

Text2Analysis: A Benchmark of Table Question Answering with Advanced Data Analysis and Unclear Queries
Xinyi He, Mengyu Zhou, Xinrun Xu, Xiaojun Ma, Rui Ding, Lun Du, Yan Gao, Ran Jia, Xu Chen, Shi Han, Zejian Yuan, Dongmei Zhang
AAAI 2024, Vancouver, Canada, February 2024.

Paper

AnaMeta: A Table Understanding Dataset of Field Metadata Knowledge Shared by Multi-dimensional Data Analysis Tasks
Xinyi He, Mengyu Zhou, Mingjie Zhou, Jialiang Xu, Xiao Lv, Tianle Li, Yijia Shao, Shi Han, Zejian Yuan, Dongmei Zhang
ACL 2023, Toronto, Canada, July 2023.

Paper

CASR: Generating Complex Sequences with Autoregressive Self-Boost Refinement
Hongwei Han, Mengyu Zhou, Shi Han, Xiu Li, Dongmei Zhang
ICLR 2023, Kigali, Rwanda, May 2023.

Paper

FormLM: Recommending Creation Ideas for Online Forms by Modelling Semantic and Structural Information
Yijia Shao, Mengyu Zhou, Yifan Zhong, Tao Wu, Hongwei Han, Shi Han, Gideon Huang, Dongmei Zhang
EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi, December 2022.

Paper 3-min Video

Towards Robust Numerical Question Answering: Diagnosing Numerical Capabilities of NLP Systems
Jialiang Xu, Mengyu Zhou, Xinyi He, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi, December 2022.

Paper 2-min Video

Table Pre-training: A Survey on Model Architectures, Pre-training Objectives, and Downstream Tasks
Haoyu Dong, Zhoujun Cheng, Xinyi He, Mengyu Zhou, Anda Zhou, Fan Zhou, Ao Liu, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
IJCAI 2022, Messe Wien, Vienna, Austria, July 2022.

Paper

MultiVision: Designing Analytical Dashboards with Deep Learning Based Recommendation
Aoyu Wu, Yun Wang, Mengyu Zhou, Xinyi He, Haidong Zhang, Huamin Qu, Dongmei Zhang
VIS 2021, Virtual, October 2021.

Paper

Table2Charts: Recommending Charts by Learning Shared Table Representations
Mengyu Zhou, Qingtao Li, Xinyi He, Yuejiang Li, Yibo Liu, Wei Ji, Shi Han, Yining Chen, Daxin Jiang, Dongmei Zhang
KDD 2021, Virtual Event, Singapore, August 2021.

Paper 14-min Video

Table2Analysis: Modeling and Recommendation of Common Analysis Patterns for Multi-Dimensional Data
Mengyu Zhou, Tao Wang, Pengxin Ji, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
AAAI 2020, New York, USA, February 2020.

Paper 2-min Video

Collaborative Learning of Human Behavior: An Empirical Study on Location Prediction
Yan Lu, Yuanchao Shu, Xu Tan, Yunxin Liu, Mengyu Zhou, Qi Chen, Dan Pei
SEC 2019, Washington DC, USA, November 2019.

Paper

The Frame Latency of Personalized Livestreaming can be Significantly Slowed Down by WiFi
Guoshun Nan, Xiuquan Qiao, Jiting Wang, Zeyan Li, Jiaohao Nu, Mengyu Zhou, Changhua Pei, Dan Pei
IPCCC 2018, Orlando, Florida, USA, November 2018.

Paper

Mining Crowd Mobility and WiFi Hotspots on a Densely-populated Campus
Mengyu Zhou, Kaixin Sui, Dan Pei, Thomas Moscibroda
PURBA 2017, Maui, Hawaii, USA, September 2017.

Paper

MinHash Hierarchy for Privacy Preserving Trajectory Sensing and Query
Jiaxin Ding, Chien-chun Ni, Mengyu Zhou, Jie Gao
IPSN 2017, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, April 2017.

Paper

EDUM: Classroom Education Measurements via Large-scale WiFi Networks
Mengyu Zhou, Minghua Ma, Yangkun Zhang, Kaixin Sui, Dan Pei, Thomas Moscibroda
UbiComp 2016, Heidelberg, Germany, September 2016.

Paper Slides

Characterizing and Improving WiFi Latency in Large-Scale Operational Networks
Kaixin Sui, Mengyu Zhou, Dapeng Liu, Minghua Ma, Dan Pei, Youjian Zhao, Zimu Li, Thomas Moscibroda
MobiSys 2016, Singapore, June 2016

Paper 1-min Video Slides

MobiCamp: a Campus-wide Testbed for Studying Mobile Physical Activities
Mengyu Zhou, Kaixin Sui, Minghua Ma, Youjian Zhao, Dan Pei, Thomas Moscibroda
WPA 2016, Singapore, June 2016

Paper Slides

Awards & Certificates

  • Tsinghua - Baidu 1st-class Scholarship (2016)
  • 1st Prize & Best Choice Award of Tsinghua 4th Innovation Contest (2015)
  • 3rd Prize of Tsinghua 2nd Optimization & Innovation Contest (2013)
  • Progressive Innovation Prize in the 13th "Challenge Cup" National Contest of College Students' Extracurricular Scientific and Technological Work (2013)
  • Top Prize in the 11th "Challenge Cup" National Contest of College Students' Extracurricular Scientific and Technological Work (2009)
  • Scholarship for Freshman, Tsinghua University (2008)
  • One of the 50 finalists of TopCoder 2008 Worldwide High School Tournament
  • One of the 50 finalists of Baidu Astar Programming Contests 2007 & 2008
  • Gold Medal (3rd place) of China NOI (National Olympiad in Informatics) 2007
 
  • Certificates, verifications, completions of >50 online courses on Coursera, edX and Udacity
  • Diplomas de Español como Lengua Extranjera (Diplomas of Spanish as a Foreign Language) A1 & A2
  • One of the 50 graduates of Tsinghua 4th Spark Class / Program for Talents on Academic and Technology Innovations (2010-2012)
  • Certificate of "Intel Cup" First Innovation and Venture Practice Summer Camp (2009)