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Email: lez023 at ucsd dot edu


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Lei (Max) Zhang

Lei (Max) Zhang

I am a second-year (2024 - ) Ph.D. student at University of California, San Diego supervised by Prof. Julian McAuley. Previously, I completed my master degree at Zhejiang University in 2024 and bachelor degree at South China University of Technology in 2021.

My research mainly focuses on multimodal models, incluidng unified architecture, reasoning, application with image, video, and spatial intelligence.

News 🎉

  • Jun. 2025 - I joined Meta GenAI as a research scientist intern in Menlo Park.
  • May. 2025 - Selected as a Notable Reviewer for ICLR 2025.
  • Jan. 2025 - Two papers get accepted by ICLR 2025.
  • Dec. 2024 - Two papers are accepted by AAAI 2025.
  • Sep. 2024 - Start Ph.D. journey at the University of California, San Diego.
  • Aug. 2023 - Fair Network Pruning gets accepted by ICCV 2023.
  • Mar. 2023 - Efficient Dataset Distillation gets accepted by CVPR 2023 as Highlight.

Publications

Full Publications: Google Scholar

  • Process-driven Image Generation via Interleaved Reasoning

    Lei Zhang, Junjiao Tian, Zhipeng Fan, Kunpeng Li, Jialiang Wang, Weifeng Chen,

    Markos Georgopoulos, Felix Juefei-Xu, Yuxiang Bao, Julian McAuley, Manling Li, Zecheng He
    Under Review, 2025

  • LLaVA-MoD: Making LLaVA Tiny via MoE Knowledge Distillation

    Fangxun Shu, Yue Liao, Lei Zhang, Le Zhuo, Chenning Xu, Guanghao Zhang, Haonan Shi,

    Long Chen, Tao Zhong, Wanggui He, Siming Fu, Haoyuan Li, Si Liu, Hongsheng Li
    ICLR, 2025

    arXiv / code
  • Audio-Visual LLM for Video Understanding

    Fangxun Shu*, Lei Zhang*, Hao Jiang, Cihang Xie
    Tech report, 2023

    arXiv
  • Filter & Align: Leveraging Human Knowledge to Curate Image-Text Data

    Lei Zhang, Fangxun Shu, Tianyang Liu, Sucheng Ren, Hao Jiang, Cihang Xie
    Tech report, 2024

    arXiv
  • Towards Fairness-aware Adversarial Network Pruning

    Lei Zhang, Zhibo Wang, Xiaowei Dong, Yunhe Feng, Xiaoyi Pang, Zhifei Zhang, Kui Ren
    ICCV, 2023

    arXiv / camera-ready
  • Accelerating Dataset Distillation via Model Augmentation

    Lei Zhang, Jie Zhang, Bowen Lei, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Xiang Pan, Bo Zhao, Caiwen Ding, Li

    Yao, Dongkuan Xu
    CVPR, 2023, Highlight

    arXiv / camera-ready

Interests

Multi-modal undestanding, generation, and alignment on efficient training and inference, data recepie: quality vs. quantity, visual tokenizer, etc.

Experiences

  • Meta GenAI
    Research Scientist Intern
    Summer 2025

Services

Reviewer for CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, ICLR, ICML, AISTATS and ACL ARR.