I am currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) guided by Prof. Yan Yan.
My research focuses on advancing Efficient AI, with interests in dataset distillation and large-scale model training. My work explores both algorithmic and systems-level approaches to improving training efficiency. I have published on dataset distillation in CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and NeurIPS, covering topics on long-tailed dataset distillation, generative dataset distillation, and dataset quantization.
I interned at Argonne National Laboratory in 2023 and 2025. In 2023, I studied the performance of distributed training frameworks such as PyTorch DDP, Horovod, and DeepSpeed. In 2025, I returned to Argonne to work on LLM training on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, where I conducted a comparative study of DeepSpeed, TorchTitan, and FSDP for scalable optimization.
Before Ph.D., I received my M.S. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Nanjing University of Post and Telecommunications (NJUPT).
I am actively exploring 2026 Summer Internship opportunities. Feel free to review my resume here.
First-author paper, "Efficient Multimodal Dataset Distillation via Generative Models" accepted to NeurIPS 2025!
Our paper, "CaO2: Rectifying Inconsistencies in Diffusion-Based Dataset Distillation" accepted to ICCV 2025!
Serving as a Local Chair at ICMR 2025!
Invited to give Lightning Talk at MMLS 2025!
Begin my internship at Argonne National Laboratory!
First-author paper, "Distilling Long-tailed Datasets" accepted to CVPR 2025!
Our paper, "SSDL:Sensor-to-Skeleton Diffusion Model with Lipschitz Regularization for Human Activity Recognition" accepted to MMM 2025!
First-author paper, "Dataset quantization with active learning based adaptive sampling" accepted to ECCV 2024!
First-author paper, "Audio-Visual Navigation with Anti-Backtracking" accepted to ICPR 2024!
First-author paper, "Monocular Expressive 3D Human Reconstruction of Multiple People" accepted to ICMR 2024 oral!
First-author paper, "Gated Multi-Scale Attention Transformer For Few-Shot Medical Image Segmentation" accepted to ISBI 2024!
First-author paper, "Supplementing Missing Visions via Dialog for Scene Graph Generations" accepted to ICASSP 2024!
First-author paper, "Machine learning enabled multiplex detection of periodontal pathogens by surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy" accepted to the journal International Journal of Biological Macromolecules!
Zhenghao Zhao, Yuzhang Shang, Junyi Wu, Yan Yan
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
PaperZhenghao Zhao, Hao Tang, Joy Wan, Yan Yan
International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), 2024
PaperZhenghao Zhao, Hao Tang, Yan Yan
International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2024
PaperZhenghao Zhao*, Ye Zhu*, Xiaoguang Zhu, Yuzhang Shang, Yan Yan
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2024
PaperZhenghao Zhao*, Hao Ding*, Dawen Cai, Yan Yan
IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI), 2024
PaperRathnayake AC Rathnayake*, Zhenghao Zhao*, Nathan McLaughlin, Wei Li, Yan Yan, Liaohai L Chen, Qian Xie, Christine D Wu, Mathew T Mathew, Rong R Wang
International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, 2024
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