Zechao Li

Professor

Intelligent Media Analysis Group (IMAG)

School of Computer Science and Engineering

Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Email: zechao[dot]li[AT]njust[dot]edu[dot]cn

Profile photo of Professor Zechao Li

Positions for Interns / Master's / PhD Programme

We are looking for self-motivated students who aim to produce impactful research or engineering contributions and publish in top-tier venues. Ideal candidates are well-rounded and demonstrate a strong and responsible attitude, solid mathematical foundations, strong programming skills, and excellent English proficiency. If you are interested, please feel free to drop me an email with your CV and a brief description of your research interests.


Biography

Zechao Li is currently a Professor and dean of the School of Computer Science and Engeering, the School of Artificial Intelligence, and the School of Software Engeering at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology. He received the Bachelor's degree from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2008 and the Doctor degree from National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2013. He has authored over 90 papers in top-tier journals and conferences. His research interests include Multimedia analysis, Embodied Intelligence, MLLM for Science, Detection & Segmentation, few-shot learning, etc. He was a recipient of the Best Paper Award in ACM Multimedia Asia 2020 and 2024. He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE TPAMI, TNNLS, etc.


Research Interests

My research focuses on intelligent multimedia analysis and computer vision, with emphasis on developing efficient and robust algorithms for real-world applications:

  • Cross-Media Intelligent Analysis
  • Embodied Intelligence
  • MLLM for Science
  • Detection & Segmentation
  • Hashing and Retrieval

News

  • [2025-10] One paper about "T2I Generation" accepted to TPAMI.
  • [2025-09] Four paper accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
  • [2025-07] Two paper accepted to ICCV 2025.
  • [2025-07] One paper "Inv Adapter" accepted to TPAMI.
  • [2025-07] One paper accepted to ACM MM 2025.
  • [2024-12] One paper "ConTriNet" accepted to TPAMI.
  • [2024-10] Received Best Paper Award at ACM Multimedia Asia 2024.
  • [2024-06] Two papers on visual grounding and visual prompting accepted to CVPR 2024.
  • [2024-03] One paper on robust visual grounding accepted to TPAMI.

Major Honors & Awards

  • 2020-2024: Elsevier Highly Cited Chinese Researchers
  • 2024: Best Paper Award of ACM Multimedia Asia
  • 2020-2023: Elsevier Highly Cited Chinese Researchers
  • 2022: The First Prize of Natural Sciences Award of The Chinese Institute of Electronics
  • 2020: The First Prize of Science and Technology Award of Jiangsu Province
  • 2020: Best Paper Award of ACM Multimedia Asia
  • 2018: The WU WEN JUN Artificial Intelligence Excellent Youth Award
  • 2018: Best Student Paper Award of International Conference on Internet Multimedia Computing and Service
  • 2017: The First Prize of Science and Technology Award of Jiangsu Province
  • 2017: Young Talent Program of China Association for Science and Technology
  • 2016: Top 10% Paper Award of IEEE MMSP
  • 2015: Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of Chinese Academy of Sciences
  • 2015: Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China Computer Federation
  • 2013: President Scholarship of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Courses Taught


Selected Publications

RCD paper preview

Peng Xing, Ning Wang, Yanpeng Sun, Jinhui Tang, Zechao Li*, "Refine, Control and Distill: A Text-to-Image Framework for Faithful Image Generation", T-PAMI, 2025.
Paper

FedMGP paper preview

Weihao Bo, Yanpeng Sun, Yu Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Zechao Li, "FedMGP: Personalized Federated Learning with Multi-Group Text-Visual Prompts", NeurIPS 2025.
Paper Pytorch Code

CSGO paper preview

Peng Xing, Haofan Wang, Yanpeng Sun, Qixun Wang, Xu Bai, Hao Ai, Jen-Yuan Huang, Zechao Li*, "CSGO: Content-Style Composition in Text-to-Image Generation", NeurIPS 2025.
Paper Pytorch Code

Halley-SVD paper preview

Jiawei Gu, Ziyue Qiao, Xinming Li, Zechao Li*, "Revitalizing SVD for Global Covariance Pooling: Halley’s Method to Overcome Over-Flattening", NeurIPS 2025.
Paper

Refining_Norms paper preview

Jiawei Gu, Ziyue Qiao, Zechao Li*, "Refining Norms: A Post-hoc Framework for OOD Detection in Graph Neural Networks", NeurIPS 2025.
Paper

ICCV25_2 paper preview

Xu Cheng, Xin Jiang, Zechao Li*, "A Unified Interpretation of Training-Time Out-of-Distribution Detection", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.
Paper

GSC paper preview

Jiawei Gu, Ziyue Qiao, Zechao Li*, "Gradient Short-Circuit: Efficient Out-of-Distribution Detection via Feature Intervention", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.
Paper

Inv-Adapter paper preview

Peng Xing, Ning Wang, Jianbo Ouyang, Zechao Li*, "Inv-Adapter: ID Customization Generation via Image Inversion and Lightweight Parameter Adapter", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2025.
Paper

ConTriNet paper preview

Hao Tang, Zechao Li*, Dong Zhang, Shengfeng He, Jinhui Tang, "Divide-and-Conquer: Confluent Triple-Flow Network for RGB-T Salient Object Detection", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2024.
Paper Pytorch Code

VRP-SAM paper preview

Yanpeng Sun, Jiahui Chen, ...,Jingdong Wang, Zechao Li*, "VRP-SAM: SAM with Visual Reference Prompt", IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2024.
Paper Pytorch Code

TransCP paper preview

Wei Tang, Liang Li, Xuejing Liu, Lu Jin, Jinhui Tang, Zechao Li*, "Context Disentangling and Prototype Inheriting for Robust Visual Grounding", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2024.
Paper Pytorch Code

SVF paper preview

Yanpeng Sun, Qiang Chen, ..., Zechao Li*, Jingdong Wang, "Singular Value Fine-tuning: Few-shot Segmentation requires Few-parameters Fine-tuning", Thirty-sixth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022.
Paper Paddle Code Pytorch Code

王锦荟, 金露, 李泽超*, 唐金辉. "基于知识蒸馏的跨模态哈希", 中国科学:技术科学, 2022.
Paper Code

Xinguang Xiang, Yajie Zhang, Lu Jin, Zechao Li, Jinhui Tang, "Sub-Region Localized Hashing for Fine-Grained Image Retrieval", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP), 2022.
Paper Code

Zechao Li, Yanpeng Sun, Liyan Zhang, Jinhui Tang, "CTNet: Context-based Tandem Network for Semantic Segmentation", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2021.
Paper Code

Zechao Li, Jinhui Tang, Liyan Zhang, Jian Yang. "Weakly-supervised Semantic Guided Hashing for Social Image Retrieval.", International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2020.
Paper Code

Lu Jin, Zechao Li*, Yonghua Pan, Jinhui Tang. "Weakly-Supervised Image Hashing through Masked Visual-Semantic Graph-based Reasoning.", Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2020.
Paper Code

Hao Tang, Zechao Li, Zhimao Peng, Jinhui Tang. "BlockMix: meta regularization and self-calibrated inference for metric-based meta-learning.", Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2020.
Paper Code

Jinhui Tang, Xiangbo Shu, Zechao Li, Yu-Gang Jiang, Qi Tian. "Social anchor-unit graph regularized tensor completion for large-scale image retagging.", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2019.
Paper Code

Zechao Li, Jinhui Tang, Tao Mei. "Deep Collaborative Embedding for Social Image Understanding.", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2019.
Paper Code

Zhimao Peng, Zechao Li*, Junge Zhang, Yan Li, Guo-Jun Qi, Jinhui Tang. "Few-shot image recognition with knowledge transfer.", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019.
Paper Code

Xiuyi Jia, Xiang Zheng, Weiwei Li, Changqing Zhang, Zechao Li*. "Facial emotion distribution learning by exploiting low-rank label correlations locally.", Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2019.
Paper Code

Xiangbo Shu, Jinhui Tang, Zechao Li, Hanjiang Lai, Liyan Zhang, Shuicheng Yan. "Personalized Age Progression with Bi-level Aging Dictionary Learning.", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2018.
Paper Code

Zechao Li, Jinhui Tang, Xiaofei He. "Robust Structured Nonnegative Matrix Factorization for Image Representation.", IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2018.
Paper Code

Jinhui Tang, Jie Lin, Zechao Li*, Jian Yang. "Discriminative deep quantization hashing for face image retrieval.", IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2018.
Paper Code

Runde Li, Jinshan Pan, Zechao Li, Jinhui Tang. "Single Image Dehazing via Conditional Generative Adversarial Network.", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018.
Paper Code

Rui Yan, Jinhui Tang, Xiangbo Shu, Zechao Li, Qi Tian. "Participation-contributed temporal dynamic model for group activity recognition.", Proceedings of the 26th ACM international conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2018.
Paper Code

Jing Wang, Jianlong Fu, Jinhui Tang, Zechao Li, Tao Mei. "Show, Reward and Tell: Automatic Generation of Narrative Paragraph From Photo Stream by Adversarial Training.", Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2018.
Paper Code

Jinhui Tang, Xiangbo Shu, Guo-Jun Qi, Zechao Li, Meng Wang, Shuicheng Yan, Ramesh Jain. "Tri-clustered Tensor Completion for Social-aware Image Tag Refinement.", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2017.
Paper Code


Academic Services

  • IEEE TPAMI 编委
  • IEEE TNNLS 编委
  • IEEE TMM 编委
  • IEEE TCSVT 编委
  • Information Sciences 编委
  • IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica(自动化学报英文版)青年编委(2021.10-)
  • JCST 编委(2019.01-)
  • CSIG 机器视觉专委会常务委员
  • CSIG 多媒体专委会常务委员
  • CCF 多媒体专委会副秘书长