Haichao Zhang

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.

Prior to my Ph.D., I obtained my M.Sc. degree from Zhejiang University (ZJU). During my graduate studies, I was also a visiting student and remote intern at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and The University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

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!

Email Me   /  Twitter   /  LinkedIn   /  GitHub   /  GoogleScholar   /  CV  

profile photo
News

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.

DIVE — Dense Information Video Evaluation

Dense Video Understanding with Gated Residual Tokenization (DIVE Benchmark)
Haichao Zhang, Wenhao Chai, Shwai He, Ang Li, Yun Fu

Preprint, 2025. Benchmark & DIVE code released; model & model (GRT) code coming soon.

arXiv   Project Website   HuggingFace Dataset   GitHub Code

VQToken: token dynamics visualization

VQToken: Neural Discrete Token Representation Learning for Extreme Token Reduction in Video Large Language Models
Haichao Zhang, Yun Fu
Extreme Token Reduction for Video LLM.

the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems NeurIPS 2025)

arXiv   Project Website   Hugging Face Model   GitHub Code

OOSTraj: Out-of-Sight Trajectory Prediction With Vision-Positioning Denoising
Haichao Zhang, Yi Xu, Hongsheng Lu, Takayuki Shimizu, Yun Fu
(First work on out-of-sight trajectory prediction.)

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2024 (CVPR'24)
arXiv   PapersWithCode Benchmark   Project Website   GitHub Code

Layout Sequence Prediction From Noisy Mobile Modality
(See Beyond Vision: Denoising Diffusion Model for Layout Trajectory Prediction from Noisy Mobile Modality)
Haichao Zhang, Yi Xu, Hongsheng Lu, Takayuki Shimizu, Yun Fu

31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM'23)
arXiv   Project Website   Video

Camouflaged Image Synthesis Is All You Need to Boost Camouflaged Detection
Haichao Zhang, Can Qin, Yu Yin, Yun Fu
arXiv

Sketch Me A Video

Sketch Me A Video
Haichao Zhang, Gang Yu, Tao Chen, Guozhong Luo
arXiv

Fine-grained Identity Preserving Landmark Synthesis

Fine-grained Identity Preserving Landmark Synthesis for Face Reenactment
Haichao Zhang, Youcheng Ben, Weixi Zhang, Tao Chen, Gang Yu, Bin Fu
arXiv

Restore DeepFakes Video Frames

Restore DeepFakes Video Frames by Identifying Individual Motion Styles
Haichao Zhang, Zhe-Ming Lu, Hao Luo, Ya-Pei Feng
Electronics Letters   Journal Page

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.

Wheelchair Control System via analysis eye-blinking EMG and EEG

Provincial Grand Prize at the Challenge Cup Competition of Science Achievement in China
project video
Mar. 2017

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.

Low power abnormal ECG detection system based on MSP430

National First Prize at National Biomedical Engineering Innovative Design Competition
project video
Nov. 2016

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.

Multimedia Information Hiding Technology of Unstructured Data

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

Meta Reality Labs Research

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

LinkedIn Video AI

Amazon | AWS AI Lab, Bellevue, WA
Applied Scientist Intern, Jun. 2024 ~ Aug. 2024

Amazon AWS AI Lab

Toyota InfoTech Lab, Mountain View, CA
Part-time Research, Feb. 2023 ~ Nov. 2023

Toyota InfoTech Lab

Tencent, Shanghai, China
Research Scientist Intern, Nov. 2020 ~ May. 2021

Tencent

SMILE Lab, Northeastern University, Boston
Graduate Student, Sep. 2022 ~ Now
Supervisor: Prof. Yun Raymond Fu

SMILE Lab

University of California, San Diego
Summer Intern, May. 2021 ~ Sep. 2021
Supervisor: Prof. Xiaolong Wang

UCSD

the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Visiting Student, Feb. 2020 ~ May. 2020
Supervisor: Prof. Xiaoguang Han

the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

Zhejiang University, Hangzhou China
Master Student, Sep. 2018 ~ Mar. 2021
Supervisor: Prof. Zhe-Ming Lu

Zhejiang University

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  Provincial First Prize
'Holtek cup' microcontroller application and design competition, Tianjin (6/453, < 1.3%)  Provincial First Prize
Tianjin IOT Innovation and Engineering Application Design Competition  Provincial First Prize
Tianjin Undergraduate Robotics Competition  Provincial First Prize
Tianjin International Student Internet Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition  Provincial Second Prize
Northern China Robotics Competition  Provincial Second Prize
Academic Service

Reviewer

• Conference: NeurIPS’23, NeurIPS’24, NeurIPS’25, IJCAI'25, MM’24, ICLR’24, ECCV'24, ICCV’25, ICML’25, AISTATS’24, WACV'25

• Journal: TPAMI, TIP, PR, TKDD, MTA, TIV

 


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