I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, USA, where I am part of the SMILE Lab, fortunate to be advised by Professor Yun Raymond Fu (Member of the Academy of Europe; Fellow of NAI, AAAS, AAAI, IEEE). My research advances generative AI for computer vision, including Visual Language Models, Video Understanding & Generation, World Models, and Trajectory & Motion Prediction/Planning. I am particularly interested in bridging these areas to enable token-efficient dense video understanding, AI-driven content creation, and autonomous systems or robotics.
Beyond academia, I have industry experience in both applied and fundamental AI research. I am currently a Research Scientist Intern at Meta Reality Labs Research (Sep–Dec 2025), working on world models and VLMs. Previously, I worked with LinkedIn (Video AI, Summer 2025) on VLMs and recommendation, and was an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon AWS AI Lab (Summer 2024) on video understanding and video large language models. Earlier, I was a research intern at Tencent (腾讯), focusing on generative models for images and videos.
I am actively seeking a research internship for Spring/Summer 2026 and open to collaborations. If you are interested in working together, feel free to reach out!
2025.09: Our paper VQToken(Extreme Token Reduction) has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
2025.08: I joined Meta as a Research Scientist Intern under Reality Labs Research.
2025.05: I joined Microsoft’s LinkedIn Video AI as a Research Intern in Video GenAI.
2024.05: I joined Amazon AWS AI Labs as an Applied Scientist Intern this summer.
2024.02: Our paper "Out-of-Sight Trajectory Prediction" has been accepted at CVPR.
2023.09: I received the ACM SIGMM travel award.
2023.08: Our paper "Layout Sequence Prediction From Noisy Mobile Modality" has been accepted at ACM MM.
2022.09: I joined SMILE Lab at Northeastern University.
Research (First-Author)
My research lies in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence. Aims to explore the potential of GenAI for Video LLMs, World Models, and Motion Prediction &Planning.
@article{zhang2025dive,
title={Dense Video Understanding with Gated Residual Tokenization},
author={Zhang, Haichao and Chai, Wenhao and He, Shwai and Li, Ang and Fu, Yun},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.14199},
year={2025}
}
@inproceedings{zhang2025vqtoken,
title = {VQToken: Neural Discrete Token Representation Learning for Extreme Token Reduction in Video Large Language Models},
author = {Haichao Zhang and Yun Fu},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
year = {2025}
}
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2024 (CVPR'24)
Cite
Copy
@inproceedings{zhang2024oostraj,
title={OOSTraj: Out-of-Sight Trajectory Prediction With Vision-Positioning Denoising},
author={Zhang, Haichao and Xu, Yi and Lu, Hongsheng and Shimizu, Takayuki and Fu, Yun},
booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
pages={14802--14811},
year={2024}
}
31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM'23)
Cite
Copy
@inproceedings{zhang2023layout,
title={Layout sequence prediction from noisy mobile modality},
author={Zhang, Haichao and Xu, Yi and Lu, Hongsheng and Shimizu, Takayuki and Fu, Yun},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia},
pages={3965--3974},
year={2023}
}
@article{zhang2023camouflaged,
title={Camouflaged Image Synthesis Is All You Need to Boost Camouflaged Detection},
author={Zhang, Haichao and Qin, Can and Yin, Yu and Fu, Yun},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.06701},
year={2023}
}
@article{zhang2021sketch,
title={Sketch Me A Video},
author={Zhang, Haichao and Yu, Gang and Chen, Tao and Luo, Guozhong},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.04710},
year={2021}
}
@article{zhang2021fine,
title={Fine-grained identity preserving landmark synthesis for face reenactment},
author={Zhang, Haichao and Ben, Youcheng and Zhang, Weixi and Chen, Tao and Yu, Gang and Fu, Bin},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.04708},
year={2021}
}
@article{zhang2021restore,
title={Restore DeepFakes video frames via identifying individual motion styles},
author={Zhang, Haichao and Lu, Zhe-Ming and Luo, Hao and Feng, Ya-Pei},
journal={Electronics Letters},
volume={57},
number={4},
pages={183--186},
year={2021},
publisher={Wiley Online Library}
}
Some Very Old & Irrelevant Projects
Several years ago, I delved into the fascinating world of sensor modalities and signal processing, sparking a keen interest in embedded platforms. That experience led me to explore further into artificial intelligence and computer vision.
Proposed to detect eye blink EMG noise mixed in EEG signal, which uses the intense eye blink signal to control the direction of wheelchairs, while analysis EEG to predict tension and relaxation degree to control the speed of the wheelchair.
An affordable solution for paralyzed patients to control their wheelchairs and move independently.
Responsible for developing upper computer software which received and filtered signals in the spectral domain from the MSP430 PCB board and developing an algorithm to detect the abnormal ECG.
Sign language recognition system of wearable bending sensor gloves
First Prize at Mobile Application Innovation Contest of North China
Jul. 2016
Responsible for programming the embedding microprocessor to sample the analog signal of the bending sensor on the gloves, which is used to predict the sign language, and showing prediction results on the app.
Vision-based paper money and coin sorting machine
Summer 2015
Responsible for programming the embedding microprocessors to control the mechanical structure and developing upper machine software to detect the kind of paper money in traditional image processing method, then sort them.
Alibaba-ZJU Joint Research Institute of Frontier Technologies Research Project
Summer 2018
Responsible for developing C++ software "Shared Memory Based Code Hiding Platform.
Particpated in video stream watermarking algorithm.
Experiences
Meta | Reality Labs Research, Redmond, WA
Research Scientist Intern, Sep. 2025 ~ Dec. 2025
Mentor: Dr. Chuan Qin, Prof. Stefan Scherer
Focus Areas: Vision-Language Models (VLM), World Model, Multimodal Learning
LinkedIn | Video AI, Mountain View, CA
Research Intern in Video GenAI, May. 2025 ~ Aug. 2025
Mentor: Dr. Yao Lu, Dr. Lichen Wang
Focus Areas: Vision-Language Models (VLM), Video Recommendation
Amazon | AWS AI Lab, Bellevue, WA
Applied Scientist Intern, Jun. 2024 ~ Aug. 2024
Toyota InfoTech Lab, Mountain View, CA
Part-time Research, Feb. 2023 ~ Nov. 2023
Tencent, Shanghai, China
Research Scientist Intern, Nov. 2020 ~ May. 2021
SMILE Lab, Northeastern University, Boston
Graduate Student, Sep. 2022 ~ Now
Supervisor: Prof. Yun Raymond Fu
University of California, San Diego
Summer Intern, May. 2021 ~ Sep. 2021
Supervisor: Prof. Xiaolong Wang
the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Visiting Student, Feb. 2020 ~ May. 2020
Supervisor: Prof. Xiaoguang Han
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou China
Master Student, Sep. 2018 ~ Mar. 2021
Supervisor: Prof. Zhe-Ming Lu
Selected Honors& Awards
ACM MM Travel Grant Award
ACM SIGMM
National Biomedical Engineering Innovative Design Competition
National First Prize
Challenge Cup Competition of Science Achievement in China
Provincial Grand Prize
Mobile Application Innovation Contest of North China