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Hi, I'm Zhixuan Chen

Ph.D. researcher · I work on Multimodal Large Language Models

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST, advised by Prof. Hao Chen. My research focuses on multimodal foundation models and vision-language intelligence, including efficient 3D visual encoding, cross-modal alignment, region-level understanding and generation, and reinforcement fine-tuning. Before HKUST, I graduated with honors from UESTC and received the China National Scholarship for three consecutive years.

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Zhixuan Chen
Multimodal LLM
3× National Scholar
HKUST
0+
Research Publications
0×
China National Scholarship
0
First-author Publications
Top 0%
Outstanding Graduate · Sichuan
Research Focus

What I work on

Building multimodal models that connect visual perception, language understanding and model reasoning, with an emphasis on fine-grained grounding, efficient adaptation and scalable training.

Multimodal Foundation Models

Large-scale vision-language learning with efficient visual representations, contrastive objectives and cross-modal semantic alignment.

Fine-grained Vision–Language Intelligence

Region-level referring, grounding and long-form generation that connect visual details with precise natural-language instructions.

Promptable Visual Understanding

Text-prompted segmentation and open-vocabulary perception, enabling natural language to drive pixel-level visual understanding.

LLM Post-training

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning, reinforcement fine-tuning and prompt learning for stronger multimodal reasoning and adaptation.

What's new

News & Highlights

Latest acceptances, awards, and milestones — most recent first.

2026.07
Nature Computational Science 🎉 Our text-promptable segmentation foundation model PathSegmentor was accepted.
2026
Nature Biomedical Engineering Our work on generalist–specialist collaboration was accepted.
2026.05
NeurIPS 2026 Submitted MedR2FT, a reasoning-aware reinforcement fine-tuning framework for multimodal models.
2025.05
MICCAI 2025 🎉 My paper got early accepted by MICCAI 2025.
2025.04
IEEE TMI 🎉 First-author paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.
2024.06
MICCAI 2024 Our paper accepted by MICCAI 2024.
2023.05
People's Daily Featured as one of only 100 students nationwide recognized for the China National Scholarship.
Research

Selected Publications

Selected work on multimodal foundation models, fine-grained vision–language understanding and efficient model adaptation. My name is shown in bold. See the full list on Google Scholar.

Recognition

Awards & Honors

A selection of competitive scholarships, honors and competition prizes.

HUANGKUN Scholarship
Top 4% · 2023.06
Gratitude to Chinese Modern Scientists Scholarship
Top 0.2% · 2023.04
China National Scholarship × 3
Top 2% · 2020 / 2021 / 2022
First-Class Excellent Student Scholarship
2020 · 2021 · 2022
Meritorious Winner · Mathematical Contest in Modeling
Top 7% · 2022.05
First Prize · National Optoelectronic Design Competition
Top 1.5% · 2021.08
First Prize · Sichuan Mathematical Modeling Competition
2021
First Prize · National College Mathematics Competition
Top 8% · 2020.12
Outstanding University Graduate of Sichuan Province
Top 1% · 2023.06
"Honorary Research" Title · UESTC
2023.06
Featured in People's Daily
100 students nationwide · 2023.05
Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis · UESTC
2023.06
Distinguished Student · School of OSE
Top 1% · 2023.06
Outstanding Student Nominee of UESTC
22 students university-wide · 2022.12
Background

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Advisor: Prof. Hao Chen
2023.09 – Present
B.Eng. in Electronic Science and Engineering (with honors)
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Advisor: Prof. Liangjian Deng
2019.09 – 2023.06
Service

Professional Service

Journal Reviewer

  • IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI)
  • IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Teaching

Teaching & Mentoring

Teaching Assistant · COMP 4021 Internet Computing (Fall 2023, Spring 2024)

Mentee · Liqi Lin (UG @ USTC), 2024.08 – Present

Let's collaborate

Open to research collaboration and opportunities in multimodal large language models, vision-language intelligence, and LLM post-training.

Email me Google Scholar GitHub