Fan Zhang (章帆)

CSE Ph.D. Student @ The Chinese University of Hong Kong

I'm currently a first-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), supervised by Prof. Pheng-Ann Heng. Previously, I have spent wonderful times as a research intern at Qwen Team, Alibaba Group and Tencent.

My research interests lie at the intersection of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Reasoning, and Agentic Systems, with an emphasis on post-training, evaluation, deep research, and their applications.

Email: fzhang25 AT cse DOT cuhk DOT edu DOT hk  ·  WeChat: ZF_Karl

I am always open to communication and collaboration. Please feel free to get in touch.

Fan Zhang

News

  • Two papers are accepted by ICML 2026. Congrats to all.
  • Two papers are accepted by ICLR 2026. Congrats to all.
  • Two papers are accepted by AAAI 2026. Congrats to all.
  • One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks Track.
  • I join CUHK CSE Department as a Ph.D. student, under the supervision of Prof. Pheng-Ann Heng.
  • I start my internship at Qwen-Audio Team, Alibaba Group.
  • I start my internship at YouTu Lab, Tencent.

Selected Publications (Full Publications)

My name is shown in bold. Google Scholar citations

  1. SEED: Self-Evolving On-Policy Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning arXiv 2026

    Jinyang Wu, Shuo Yang, Zhengxi Lu, Fan Zhang, Yuhao Shen, Lang Feng, Haoran Luo, Zheng Lian, Shuai Zhang, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao

    arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper] [Code]

  2. DeepSearch-World: Self-Distillation for Deep Search Agents in a Verifiable Environment arXiv 2026

    Xinyu Geng, Xuanhua He, Sixiang Chen, Yanjing Xiao, Fan Zhang, Shijue Huang, Haitao Mi, Zhenwen Liang, Tianqing Fang, Yi R. Fung

    arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper]

  3. OPID: On-Policy Skill Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning arXiv 2026

    Shuo Yang, Jinyang Wu, Zhengxi Lu, Yuhao Shen, Fan Zhang, Lang Feng, Shuai Zhang, Haoran Luo, Zheng Lian, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao

    arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper] [Code]

  4. OmniGameArena: A Unified UE5 Benchmark for VLM Game Agents with Improvement Dynamics arXiv 2026

    Mingxian Lin, Shengju Qian, Yuqi Liu, Yi-Hua Huang, Yiyu Wang, Wei Huang, Yitang Li, Fan Zhang, Zeyu Hu, Lingting Zhu, Xin Wang, Xiaojuan Qi

    arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper] [Project] [Code]

  5. Struct-Searcher: Agentic Structural Thinking Advances Multimodal Deep Information Seeking COLM 2026

    Fan Zhang, Vireo Zhang, Shengju Qian, Haoxuan Li, Zheng Lian, Hao Wu, Yuan Gao, Xinyu Geng, Xin Wang, Pheng-Ann Heng

    Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026. [Paper]

  6. Maestro: Reinforcement Learning to Orchestrate Hierarchical Model-Skill Ensembles arXiv 2026

    Jinyang Wu, Guocheng Zhai, Ruihan Jin, Yuhao Shen, Zhengxi Lu, Fan Zhang, Haoran Luo, Zheng Lian, Zhengqi Wen, Jianhua Tao

    arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper]

  7. AffectGPT-RL: Revealing Roles of Reinforcement Learning in Open-Vocabulary Emotion Recognition arXiv 2026

    Zheng Lian, Fan Zhang, Lan Chen, Yazhou Zhang, Rui Liu, Jinyang Wu, Haoyu Chen, Xiaobai Li, Xiaojiang Peng, Bin He, Jianhua Tao

    arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper]

  8. Learning to Memorize with Attributive and Associative Memory for Online Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models ICML 2026

    Yuchao Zhang, Hao Wang, Fan Zhang, Qirui Mi, Mengyue Yang, Yisen Wang, Jun Wang, Haoxuan Li, Zhouchen Lin

    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026. CCF Rank A [Paper]

  9. MME-Emotion: A Holistic Evaluation Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence in Multimodal Large Language Models ICLR 2026

    Fan Zhang, Zebang Cheng, Chong Deng, Haoxuan Li, Zheng Lian, Qian Chen, Huadai Liu, Wen Wang, YiFan Zhang, Renrui Zhang, Ziyu Guo, Zhihong Zhu, Hao Wu, Haixin Wang, Yefeng Zheng, Xiaojiang Peng, Xian Wu, Kun Wang, Xiangang Li, Jieping Ye, Pheng-Ann Heng

    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. CCF Rank A [Project]

  10. EmoPrefer: Can Large Language Models Understand Human Emotion Preferences? ICLR 2026

    Zheng Lian, Licai Sun, Lan Chen, Haoyu Chen, Zebang Cheng, Fan Zhang, Ziyu Jia, Ziyang Ma, Fei Ma, Xiaojiang Peng, Jianhua Tao

    International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. CCF Rank A [Paper] [Code]

  11. Rethinking Facial Expression Recognition in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models: Benchmark, Datasets, and Beyond arXiv 2025

    Fan Zhang, Haoxuan Li, Shengju Qian, Xin Wang, Zheng Lian, Hao Wu, Zhihong Zhu, Yuan Gao, Qiankun Li, Yefeng Zheng, Zhouchen Lin, Pheng-Ann Heng

    arXiv preprint, 2025. [Paper] [Code]

  12. AffectGPT-R1: Leveraging Reinforcement Learning for Open-Vocabulary Multimodal Emotion Recognition arXiv 2025

    Zheng Lian, Fan Zhang, Yazhou Zhang, Jianhua Tao, Rui Liu, Haoyu Chen, Xiaobai Li, Bin He

    arXiv preprint, 2025. [Paper]

  13. CellVerse: Do Large Language Models Really Understand Cell Biology? NeurIPS 2025

    Fan Zhang, Tianyu Liu, Zhihong Zhu, Hao Wu, Haixin Wang, Donghao Zhou, Yefeng Zheng, Kun Wang, Xian Wu, Pheng-Ann Heng

    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2025. CCF Rank A [Paper] [Project]

  14. DREAM: Decoupled Discriminative Learning with Bigraph-aware Alignment for Semi-supervised 2D-3D Cross-modal Retrieval AAAI 2025

    Fan Zhang, Changhu Wang, Zebang Cheng, Xiaojiang Peng, Dongjie Wang, Yijia Xiao, Chong Chen, Xian-Sheng Hua, Xiao Luo

    Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025. CCF Rank A [Paper]

  15. Semi-supervised Knowledge Transfer Across Multi-omic Single-cell Data NeurIPS 2024

    Fan Zhang, Tianyu Liu, Zihao Chen, Xiaojiang Peng, Chong Chen, Xian-Sheng Hua, Xiao Luo, Hongyu Zhao

    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024. CCF Rank A [Paper]

  16. Fine-grained Prototypical Voting with Heterogeneous Mixup for Semi-supervised 2D-3D Cross-modal Retrieval CVPR 2024

    Fan Zhang, Xian-Sheng Hua, Chong Chen, Xiao Luo

    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024. CCF Rank A [Paper]

  17. DEMO: A Statistical Perspective for Efficient Image-Text Matching NAACL 2024

    Fan Zhang, Xian-Sheng Hua, Chong Chen, Xiao Luo

    North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2024. CCF Rank B [Paper]

  18. HOPE: A Hierarchical Perspective for Semi-supervised 2D-3D Cross-Modal Retrieval TPAMI 2024

    Fan Zhang, Hang Zhou, Xian-Sheng Hua, Chong Chen, Xiao Luo

    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2024. CCF Rank A, JCR Q1, IF=23.6 [Paper]

  19. FATE: Learning Effective Binary Descriptors with Group Fairness TIP 2024

    Fan Zhang, Chong Chen, Xian-Sheng Hua, Xiao Luo

    IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2024. CCF Rank A, JCR Q1, IF=10.6 [Paper]

Surveys & Tutorials

  1. A Survey on Multi-modal Intent Recognition: Recent Advances and New Frontiers EMNLP 2025

    Zhihong Zhu, Fan Zhang, Yunyan Zhang, Jinghan Sun, Zhiqi Huang, Qingqing Long, Bowen Xing, Xian Wu

    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2025. [Paper] [Resources]

  2. A Survey on Foundation Language Models for Single-cell Biology ACL 2025

    Fan Zhang, Hao Chen, Zhihong Zhu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhenxi Lin, Ziyue Qiao, Yefeng Zheng, Xian Wu

    Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025. CCF Rank A [Paper]

  3. Can We Trust AI Doctors? A Survey of Medical Hallucination in Large Language and Large Vision-Language Models ACL 2025

    Zhihong Zhu, Yunyan Zhang, Xianwei Zhuang, Fan Zhang, Zhongwei Wan, Yuyan Chen, Qingqing Long, Yefeng Zheng, Xian Wu

    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL, 2025. [Paper] [Resources]

  4. A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deployment arXiv 2025

    Kun Wang, Guibin Zhang, Zhenhong Zhou, Jiahao Wu, Miao Yu, Shiqian Zhao, Chenlong Yin, Jinhu Fu, Yibo Yan, Hanjun Luo, …, Fan Zhang, et al.

    arXiv preprint, 2025. [Paper]

  5. Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges arXiv 2025

    Junyu Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Ye Yuan, Yusheng Zhao, Junwei Yang, Yiyang Gu, Bohan Wu, Binqi Chen, Ziyue Qiao, Qingqing Long, Rongcheng Tu, Xiao Luo, Wei Ju, Zhiping Xiao, Yifan Wang, Meng Xiao, Chenwu Liu, Jingyang Yuan, Shichang Zhang, Yiqiao Jin, Fan Zhang, Xian Wu, Hanqing Zhao, Dacheng Tao, Philip S. Yu, Ming Zhang

    arXiv preprint, 2025. [Paper] [Resources]

Experience

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Professional Activities