About me 👋
I am a first-year Computer Science PhD student at UC Berkeley, advised by Matei Zaharia and Sewon Min. I'm a member of Sky Computing Lab, Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) and Berkeley NLP Group.
My current research focuses on understanding and improving the reasoning capabilities of language models—especially for tasks that demand more than just the final answer. I'm interested in how to train models more effectively with the right data and better leverage test-time compute. I also investigate how integrating domain knowledge can enable AI systems to better support computer scientists and mathematicians in retrieval‐augmented generation. I care more about making systems precise than making them fast.
Before Berkeley, I earned my BS in Computer Science from Nanjing University. I worked on distributed systems (reliability and verification) and program analysis and have won an OSDI Best Paper Award. I still enjoy talking about those topics—just don't blame me if I mislead you.
I understand how much research success can depend on access and opportunity. If you're from an underrepresented group and think it might help to talk, feel free to reach out by email.
Publications
Preprints
- Reasoning Models Can Be Effective Without Thinking
Wenjie Ma, Jingxuan He, Charlie Snell, Tyler Griggs, Sewon Min, Matei Zaharia
[Paper]
Preprint, 2025 - The Danger of Overthinking: Examining the Reasoning-Action Dilemma in Agentic Tasks
Alejandro Cuadron, Dacheng Li, Wenjie Ma, Xingyao Wang, Yichuan Wang, Siyuan Zhuang, Luis Gaspar Schroeder, Tian Xia, Huanzhi Mao, Shu Liu, Nicholas Thumiger, Aditya Desai, Ion Stoica, Ana Klimovic, Graham Neubig, Joseph E. Gonzalez
[Paper]
Preprint, 2025
Peer-reviewed
- Anvil: Verifying Liveness of Cluster Management Controllers
Xudong Sun, Wenjie Ma, Jiawei Tyler Gu, Zicheng Ma, Tej Chajed, Jon Howell, Andrea Lattuada, Oded Padon, Lalith Suresh, Adriana Szekeres, Tianyin Xu
In Proceedings of the 18th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2024), Santa Clara, CA, Jul. 2024
[Paper] [Code] [Talk]
🏆 Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award - Context Sensitivity without Contexts: A Cut-Shortcut Approach to Fast and Precise Pointer Analysis
Wenjie Ma*, Shengyuan Yang*, Tian Tan, Xiaoxing Ma, Chang Xu, Yue Li
In Proceedings of the 44th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2023), Orlando, FL, June 2023
[Paper] [Code]
Miscellaneous
My hobbies tend to evolve over time. Lately, I've been really into everything related to food and drinks—experimenting with recipes and ingredients, and occasionally trying to reverse-engineer restaurant dishes at home. I also love trying out new sports. On weekdays, I hit the gym late at night, and on weekends, I go for whatever activities I can find partners for (tennis, bouldering, hiking, boxing, or anything else that comes up).
I enjoy conversations with people from diverse fields, especially those I’m less familiar with. My research is problem-driven, and I like interdisciplinary work.
I love learning about different cultures and seize every chance I get to travel.