Zhen Zhu
Urbana, US
zhenzhu4@illinois.edu

A final-year CS Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), specializing in building intelligent systems for continual perception, recognition, understanding, and prediction. Research interests include efficient continual learning, personal AI agents, image generation, and the emerging properties of large models. Strong background in fundamental vision tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation.

Education


University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States
January 2021
 — 
May 2025
Ph.D. in Computer Science
    Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China
    September 2017
     — 
    June 2020
    Master in Computer Vision and Deep Learning
      Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China
      September 2013
       — 
      June 2017
      Bachelor of Engineering in Engineering

        Experience


        Research Intern
        May 2024
         — 
        August 2024
        Google Inc.

        Worked on text-to-video generation projects.

          Research Scientist Intern
          May 2023
           — 
          August 2023
          Adobe Inc.

          Bridged LLMs and Diffusion models to create a dynamic system for automatic and continual data generation to improve discriminative task performance.

            Research Scientist Intern
            May 2022
             — 
            August 2022
            Adobe Inc.

            Created a unified GAN framework for generating multiple image analyses with RGB images simultaneously and demonstrated the model's effectiveness in generating datasets for downstream tasks such as depth and normal estimation. Paper accepted to WACV 2024.

            • Paper accepted to WACV 2024
            Research Assistant
            August 2020
             — 
            November 2020
            ShanghaiTech

            Engaged in human novel view synthesis and hair neural rendering under the supervision of Prof. Jingyi Yu. A paper accepted to ACM MM.

            • Paper accepted to ACM MM

            Projects


            Volunteer


            Certificates


            Publications


            Anytime Continual Learning for Open Vocabulary Classification
            January 2024
            ECCV 2024

            Oral presentation on Anytime Continual Learning for Open Vocabulary Classification.

            Continual Learning in Open-vocabulary Classification with Complementary Memory Systems
            January 2024
            TMLR 2024
            Survey on Memory-Augmented Neural Networks: Cognitive Insights to AI Applications.
            January 2023
            Arxiv

            Survey on Memory-Augmented Neural Networks with cognitive insights to AI applications.

            Comparing Human Object Learning with Deep Neural Networks
            January 2023
            Journal of Vision
            SingleInsert: Inserting New Concepts from a Single Image into Text-to-Image Models for Flexible Editing
            January 2023
            Under review 2023
            Consistent Multimodal Generation via A Unified GAN Framework
            January 2024
            WACV 2024
            CCPL: Contrastive Coherence Preserving Loss for Versatile Style Transfer
            January 2022
            ECCV 2022

            Joint first author.

            MobileFaceSwap: A Lightweight Framework for Video Face Swapping
            January 2022
            AAAI 2022
            Progressive and Aligned Pose Attention Transfer for Person Image Generation
            January 2021
            TPAMI 2021
            FaceController: Controllable Attribute Editing for Face in the Wild
            January 2021
            AAAI 2021
            WDNet: Watermark-Decomposition Network for Visible Watermark Removal
            January 2021
            WACV 2021
            Semantic Flow for Fast and Accurate Scene Parsing
            January 2020
            ECCV 2020
            Semantically Mutil-modal Image Synthesis
            January 2020
            CVPR 2020
            Asymmetric Non-local Neural Networks for Semantic Segmentation
            January 2019
            ICCV 2019
            Progressive Pose Attention Transfer for Person Image Generation
            January 2019
            CVPR 2019
            Non-stationary Texture Synthesis by Adversarial Expansion
            January 2018
            SIGGRAPH 2018

            Joint first author.

            Feature Fusion for Scene Text Detection
            January 2018
            DAS 2018
            DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images
            January 2018
            CVPR 2018
            Rotation-sensitive Regression for Oriented Scene Text Detection
            January 2018
            CVPR 2018
            Auto-Encoder Guided GAN for Chinese Calligraphy Synthesis
            January 2017
            ICDAR 2017

            Awards


            Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship
            August 2024

            Awarded for outstanding potential as a future faculty member.

            National Fellowship
            October 2019

            Received National Fellowship for academic excellence.

            National Fellowship
            October 2018

            Received National Fellowship for academic excellence.

            Zhixing Outstanding Awards
            October 2019

            Received Zhixing Outstanding Awards for exceptional performance.

            Zhixing Outstanding Awards
            October 2018

            Received Zhixing Outstanding Awards for exceptional performance.

            Outstanding Graduates
            June 2017

            Recognized as an Outstanding Graduate.

            Golden Prize
            January 2019
            Fifth China "Internet+" College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition
            1st place
            May 2019
            ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge On SROIE--Task 2
            1st place of students group
            May 2019
            ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge On ReCTS--Task 3
            1st place at ICDAR 2019 Robusst Reading Challenge On SROIE--Task 2
            May 2019
            1st place at ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge On SROIE--Task 2
            May 2019
            1st place at ICDAR 2019 Robust Reading Challenge On SROIE--Task 2
            May 2019

            Languages


            Skills


            Interests


            References