Hi I am Max, a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of California San Diego, working with Julian McAuley on tackling challenges in today’s multimodal large language model. I am currently a Research Intern in NVIDIA Research.

I recevied my B.S. from South China University of Technology and M.S. from Zhejiang University. Previously, I have interned at Meta GenAI.

Publications

• Think in Strokes not in Pixels: 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.

• 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.

• Audio-Visual LLM for Video Understanding.
  Fangxun Shu*, Lei Zhang*, Hao Jiang, Cihang Xie.
  Technical Report.

• Filter & Align: Leveraging Human Knowledge to Curate Image-Text Data.
  Lei Zhang, Fangxun Shu, Tianyang Liu, Sucheng Ren, Hao Jiang, Cihang Xie.
  Technical Report.

• Towards Fairness-aware Adversarial Network Pruning.
  Lei Zhang, Zhibo Wang, Xiaowei Dong, Yunhe Feng, Xiaoyi Pang, Zhifei Zhang, Kui Ren.
  ICCV 2023.

• 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.

Professional Experience

Research Intern, Meta MSL
Mentor: Zecheng He, Junjiao Tian, and Zhipeng Fan
Summer 2025 - Winter 2025