Lei (Max) Zhang - Personal Website

Hello

[New!] I will join NVIDIA as a research intern in Summer 2026.

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science & Engineering at University of California San Diego, working with Prof. Julian McAuley on tackling challenges in today’s multimodal large language model. Before that, I earned BS in Software Engineering from South China University of Technology and MS in Computer Science from Zhejiang University. I had also spent time as a research scientist intern at Meta GenAI in summer 2025.

Research

◆ Multimodal Intelligence — Advancing both the native capabilities and agentic wisdom of multimodal models to empower them with more sophisticated reasoning abilities in understanding and generation.

◆ Scalable Training Methodology — Developing data curation, synthesis, evaluation and training strategies to scale multimodal models toward stronger and more generalizable intelligence.

Publications

For a complete list of publications, please visit my Google Scholar.

Think in Strokes, Not Pixels: Process-driven Image Generation via Interleaved Reasoning Under Review 2025

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

LLaVA-MoD: Making LLaVA Tiny via MoE Knowledge Distillation ICLR 2025

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

Audio-Visual LLM for Video Understanding Tech Report 2024

Fangxun Shu*, Lei Zhang*, Hao Jiang, Cihang Xie

Filter & Align: Leveraging Human Knowledge to Curate Image-Text Data Tech Report 2024

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

Towards Fairness-aware Adversarial Network Pruning ICCV 2023

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

Accelerating Dataset Distillation via Model Augmentation CVPR 2023

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

Highlight (2.3% acceptance rate)

Experience

Research Intern · NVIDIA

Incoming Summer 2026

Feb. 2026 – Present

Research Scientist Intern · Meta MSL

Mentor: ZeCheng He, Junjiao Tian, Zhipeng Fan

Jun. – Dec. 2025

Miscellaneous

In my spare time, I am an avid reader, a dedicated foodie on a mission to find the best local eats, and a travel at heart. Find me on Instagram for a glimpse into my adventures and culinary discoveries!