Zhuokai Zhao -- Personal Webpage (original) (raw)
Biography
News & Updates
- Three papers, FusionRoute, LILO, and DAG-MoE are accepted to ICML 2026.
04/30/2026 - Two papers, Mixture-of-Minds (Main) and TARo (Findings), are accepted to ACL 2026.
04/07/2026 - One paper, DreamGym, is accepted to ICLR 2026.
01/26/2026 - One paper, RLMesh, is accepted to AISTATS 2026.
01/23/2026 - Four papers, ThoughtCommunication (Spotlight), Dropout Decoding, S'MoRE, and MJ-Bench, are accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
09/18/2025 - One paper, DISCO, is accepted to EMNLP 2025.
08/20/2025 - One paper, SPOC, is accepted to COLM 2025.
07/07/2025 - Two papers, RankCLIP and DyTo, are accepted to ICCV 2025.
06/25/2025 - One paper, ICoV, is accepted to CVPR 2025 MAR Workshop with oral presentation.
02/26/2025 - One paper, HumanMM, is accepted to CVPR 2025.
02/26/2025 - One paper, SCYLLA, is accepted to ICLR 2025.
01/22/2025 - One paper, DAO, is accepted to NeurIPS 2024 BDU Workshop with oral presentation.
10/09/2024 - One paper, NERO, is accepted to NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Interpretable AI.
10/09/2024 - One paper, EscIRL, is accepted to CoRL 2024.
09/05/2024 - Started a new position as Research Scientist at Meta.
06/24/2024 - One paper, ACS, is accepted to IROS 2024.
06/30/2024 - One paper, HALC, is accepted to ICML 2024.
05/01/2024 - One paper is accepted to ICME 2024.
04/27/2024 - One paper, AutoPRM, is accepted to NAACL 2024.
03/13/2024 - One paper, User-Centric Ranking, is accepted to KDD 2023.
05/16/2023
Publications (* indicates co-first authorship, † means joint last author)
2026
OmniOPD: Logit-Free On-Policy Distillation via Speculative Verification
Yuhang Zhou, Lizhu Zhang, Yifan Wu, Mingyi Wang, Bo Peng, Jiayi Liu, Xiangjun Fan, and Zhuokai Zhao
In submission, 2026
Self-Policy Distillation via Capability-Selective Subspace Projection
Guangya Hao, Yitong Shang, Yunbo Long, and Zhuokai Zhao†, Hanxue Liang†
In submission, 2026
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Decentralized Memory
Guangya Hao, Yunbo Long, and Zhuokai Zhao
In submission, 2026
LILO: Bayesian Optimization with Interactive Natural Language Feedback
43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute
43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
DAG-MoE: From Simple Mixture to Structural Aggregation in Mixture-of-Experts
Jiarui Feng, Hanqing Zeng, Karish Grover, Ruizhong Qiu, Yinglong Xia, Qiang Zhang, Qifan Wang, Ren Chen, Dongqi Fu, Jiayi Liu, Zhuokai Zhao, Xiangjun Fan, Benyu Zhang, Benyu Zhang, and Yixin Chen
43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
TARo: Token-level Adaptive Routing for LLM Test-time Alignment
Arushi Rai, Qiang Zhang, Hanqing Zeng, Yunkai Zhang, Dipesh Tamboli, Xiangjun Fan, and Zhuokai Zhao†, Lizhu Zhang†
Findings of The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding
Yuhang Zhou, Mingrui Zhang, Ke Li, Mingyi Wang, Qiao Liu, Qifei Wang, Jiayi Liu, Fei Liu, Serena Li, Weiwei Li, Mingze Gao, Abhishek Kumar, Xiangjun Fan, and Zhuokai Zhao†, Lizhu Zhang†
The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
Synthetic Sandbox for Training Machine Learning Engineering Agents
Yuhang Zhou*, Lizhu Zhang* Yifan Wu, Jiayi Liu, Xiangjun Fan, and Zhuokai Zhao†, Hong Yan†
In submission, 2026
CircuitProbe: Tracing Visual Temporal Evidence Flow in Video Language Models
Yiming Zhang*, Zhuokai Zhao*, Chengzhang Yu, Kun Wang, Zhendong Chu, Qiankun Li, Zihan Chen, Yang Liu, Zenghui Ding, Yining Sun, and Qingsong Wen
In submission, 2026
Accelerating PDE Surrogates via RL-Guided Mesh Optimization
The 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2026
Scaling Agent Learning via Experience Synthesis
Zhaorun Chen, Zhuokai Zhao, Kai Zhang, Bo Liu, Qi Qi, Yifan Wu, Tarun Kalluri, Sara Cao, Yuanhao Xiong, Haibo Tong, Huaxiu Yao, Hengduo Li, Jiacheng Zhu, Xian Li, Dawn Song, Bo Li, and Jason Weston†, Dat Huynh†
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
2025
Exploring System 1 and 2 Communication for Latent Reasoning in LLMs
Julian Coda-Forno, Zhuokai Zhao, Qiang Zhang, Dipesh Tamboli, Weiwei Li, Xiangjun Fan, Lizhu Zhang, Eric Schulz, and Hsiao-Ping Tseng
39th NeurIPS Workshop on Foundations of Reasoning in Language Models, 2025
Let it Calm: Exploratory Annealed Decoding for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning
In submission, 2025
Thought Communication in Multiagent Collaboration
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Spotlight, 2025
S'MoRE: Structural Mixture of Residual Experts for LLM Fine-tuning
Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia, Zhuokai Zhao, Gilbert Jiang, Qiang Zhang, Jiayi Liu, Lizhu Zhang, Xiangjun Fan, and Benyu Zhang
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
MJ-BENCH: Is Your Multimodal Reward Model Really a Good Judge for Text-to-Image Generation?
Zhaorun Chen*, Yichao Du*, Zichen Wen*, Yiyang Zhou*, Chenhang Cui, Zhenzhen Weng, Haoqin Tu,
Chaoqi Wang, Zhengwei Tong, Qinglan Huang, Canyu Chen, Qinghao Ye, Zhihong Zhu, Yuqing Zhang, Jiawei Zhou,
Zhuokai Zhao, Rafael Rafailov, Chelsea Finn, and Huaxiu Yao
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
Enhancing Vision-Language Model Reliability with Uncertainty-Guided Dropout Decoding
Yixiong Fang, Ziran Yang, Zhaorun Chen, Zhuokai Zhao†, and Jiawei Zhou†
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
StreamMem: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Memory for Streaming Video Understanding
In submission, 2025
DISCO Balances the Scales: Adaptive Domain- and Difficulty-Aware Reinforcement Learning on Imbalanced Data
Yuhang Zhou*, Jing Zhu*, Shengyi Qian, Zhuokai Zhao, Xiyao Wang, Xiaoyu Liu, Ming Li, Paiheng Xu, Wei Ai, and Furong Huang,
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025
Boosting LLM Reasoning via Spontaneous Self-Correction
Xutong Zhao, Tengyu Xu, Xuewei Wang, Zhengxing Chen, Di Jin, Liang Tan, Yen-Ting Lin, Zishun Yu, Zhuokai Zhao, Yun He, Sinong Wang, Han Fang, Sarath Chandar, and Chen Zhu
Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2025
RankCLIP: Ranking-Consistent Language-Image Pretraining
Yiming Zhang*, Zhuokai Zhao*, Zhaorun Chen, Zhili Feng, Zenghui Ding, and Yining Sun
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025
Beyond Training: Dynamic Token Merging for Zero-Shot Video Understanding
Yiming Zhang, Zhuokai Zhao, Zhaorun Chen, Zenghui Ding, Xianjun Yang, and Yining Sun
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025
Transfer between Modalities with MetaQueries
Xichen Pan, Satya Narayan Shukla, Aashu Singh, Zhuokai Zhao, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Jialiang Wang, Zhiyang Xu, Jiuhai Chen, Kunpeng Li, Felix Juefei-Xu, Ji Hou, and Saining Xie
In submission, 2025
CAFe: Unifying Representation and Generation with Contrastive-Autoregressive Finetuning
Hao Yu, Zhuokai Zhao, Shen Yan, Lukasz Korycki, Jianyu Wang, Baosheng He, Jiayi Liu, Lizhu Zhang, Xiangjun Fan, and Hanchao Yu
ICCV Findings, 2025
HumanMM: Global Human Motion Recovery from Multi-shot Videos
Yuhong Zhang*, Guanlin Wu*, Ling-Hao Chen, Zhuokai Zhao, Jing Lin, Xiaoke Jiang, Jiamin Wu, Zhuoheng Li, Hao Frank Yang, Haoqian Wang, and Lei Zhang
The IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025
Autonomous Multimodal Reasoning via Implicit Chain-of-Vision
Yiqiao Huang*, He Qi*, Zhaorun Chen, Haopeng Zhang, Hanchao Yu, and Zhuokai Zhao
CVPR Workshop on Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning Oral Presentation, 2025
Quantifying Generalization Complexity for Large Language Models
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
Beyond Reward Hacking: Causal Rewards for Large Language Model Alignment
Chaoqi Wang*, Zhuokai Zhao*, Yibo Jiang*, Zhaorun Chen*, Chen Zhu, Yuxin Chen, Jiayi Liu, Lizhu Zhang, Hao Ma, and Sinong Wang
In submission, 2025
2024
Direct Acquisition Optimization for Low-Budget Active Learning
Zhuokai Zhao, Yibo Jiang, and Yuxin Chen
38th NeurIPS Workshop on Bayesian Decision-making and Uncertainty Spotlight Talk, 2024
Evaluating Machine Learning Models with NERO: Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits
38th NeurIPS Workshop on Interpretable AI, 2024
EscIRL: Evolving Self-Contrastive IRL for Trajectory Prediction in Autonomous Driving
Siyue Wang*, Zhaorun Chen*, Zhuokai Zhao, Chaoli Mao, Yiyang Zhou, Jiayu He, and Albert Sibo Hu
8th Annual Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024
Preference Optimization with Multi-Sample Comparisons
In submission, 2024
Multimodal Guidance Network for Missing-Modality Inference in Content Moderation
Zhuokai Zhao, Harish Palani, Tianyi Liu, Lena Evans, and Ruth Toner
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2024
PANDORA: Detailed LLM Jailbreaking via Collaborated Phishing Agents with Decomposed Reasoning
12th ICLR Workshop on Secure and Trustworthy Large Language Models, 2024
Safe Reinforcement Learning via Hierarchical Adaptive Chance-Constraint Safeguards
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024
HALC: Object Hallucination Reduction via Adaptive Focal-Contrast Decoding
41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024 Preliminary version appeared in 12th ICLR Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models, 2024
AutoPRM: Automating Procedural Supervision for Multi-Step Reasoning via Controllable Question Decomposition
Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2024 Preliminary version appeared in ICLR Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models, 2024
2023
RELAX: Reinforcement Learning Enabled 2D-LiDAR Autonomous System for Parsimonious UAVs
Guanlin Wu, Zhuokai Zhao, and Yutao He
39th AAAI Workshop on Planning and Reinforcement Learning (PRL), 2023
Breaking the Curse of Quality Saturation with User-Centric Ranking
29th Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2023
2020
System and Method for Assisted Patient Positioning
U.S. Patent No. 10,783,655, 2020
Early Feasibility Studies of Augmented Reality Navigation for Lateral Skull Base Surgery
Otology & Neurotology 41(7):p 883-888, 2020
Dissertations
Enhanced Data Utilization for Efficient and Trustworthy Deep Learning
Zhuokai Zhao
Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2024
Utilizing Both Past and Future: Multi-Frame Memory Based Network in Solving Particle Image Velocimetry
Zhuokai Zhao
MS in Computer Science, 2021
Other Projects
OpenChemistry/Stempy: Stable Version
Zenodo, 2024
Trajectory Planning and Control for Nonholonomic Robot Among Onstacles
Nonlinear Control and Planning in Robotics, 2018
Head-Mounted Display Integration for Orthopedic Surgery
Advanced Computer-Integrated Surgery, 2017
Service
Conference Area Chair
- Conference On Language Modeling (COLM)
'26
Conference Reviewer
- International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
'25, '26 - Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
'23, '24, '25 - International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
'23, '24, '25, '26 - International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
'25 - Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
'25, '26 - Conference On Language Modeling (COLM)
'25 - SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
'24 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
'23, '24 - International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
'25, '26 - International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
'24 - International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
'24 - ACM Multimedia (ACM MM)
'24 - IEEE Visualization Conference (IEEE VIS)
'23 - IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)
'23, '24, '25 - SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM)
'24 - The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)
'23
Journal Reviewer
- IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)
'23 - IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
'25 - Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
'23
Last Updated: June 11, 2026