Qiran Zou

Qiran Zou

PhD Student  ·  ASI Lab, National University of Singapore

qiranzou [at] gmail [dot] com

I am currently a second-year PhD student at ASI Lab, National University of Singapore, mentored by Prof. Dianbo Liu.

My research interests lie in autonomous ML agents (especially AI Scientist), generative models, and representation learning, which I believe have the potential to truly transform how science is done.

Before that, I was a research assistant at BNRist, Tsinghua University, mentored by Prof. Xiangyang Ji and Prof. Yi Xu. I received my master's degree in 2022 from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, under the supervision of Prof. Xiangyang Ji. My previous research has focused on unsupervised segmentation and text-to-motion synthesis, aiming to reduce human annotation effort and improve learning efficiency.

Research Interests

  • Autonomous ML Agents & AI Scientist
  • Representation Learning
  • Generative Models

Previously: Text-to-Motion Synthesis, Unsupervised Segmentation

News

  • [2025] New preprint: FML-bench — a benchmark for evaluating autonomous ML research agents.
  • [2025] New preprint: LanSE — a method for human-like analysis of AI-generated images using language-grounded sparse encoders.
  • [2024] Our paper on representation collapsing problems in vector quantization is accepted to NeurIPS Safe Generative AI Workshop 2024.
  • [2024] Our paper ParCo on part-coordinating text-to-motion synthesis is accepted to ECCV 2024.
  • [Dec. 2022] Our paper on unsupervised foreground-background segmentation is accepted to AAAI 2023 (Main Track, Oral).
  • [Oct. 2021] Our paper on learning foreground-background segmentation from improved layered GANs is accepted to WACV 2022.

Publications

FML-bench teaser
arXiv
Qiran Zou, Hou Hei Lam, Wenhao Zhao, Yiming Tang, Tingting Chen, Samson Yu, Tianyi Zhang, Chang Liu, Xiangyang Ji, Dianbo Liu
arXiv preprint, 2025
LanSE teaser
arXiv
Yiming Tang, Arash Lagzian, Srinivas Anumasa, Qiran Zou, Yingtao Zhu, Ye Zhang, Trang Nguyen, Yih-Chung Tham, Ehsan Adeli, Ching-Yu Cheng, Yilun Du, Dianbo Liu
arXiv preprint, 2025
Representation Collapsing Problems in VQ teaser
NeurIPS Workshop
Zhao Wenhao*, Qiran Zou*, Rushi Shah, Dianbo Liu. (*equal contribution)
NeurIPS Safe Generative AI Workshop, 2024
ParCo teaser
ECCV 2024
Qiran Zou*, Shangyuan Yuan*, Yu Wang, Shian Du, Chang Liu, Yi Xu, Jie Chen, Xiangyang Ji. (*equal contribution)
ECCV 2024
ILSGAN teaser
AAAI 2023 Oral
Qiran Zou, Yu Yang, Wing Yin Cheung, Chang Liu, Xiangyang Ji
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023. Main Track.
Improved Layered GANs teaser
WACV 2022
Yu Yang, Hakan Bilen, Qiran Zou, Wing Yin Cheung, Xiangyang Ji
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2022
CrTe2 paper teaser
Nanotechnology
Chaolun Wang, Qiran Zou, Zhiheng Cheng, Jietao Chen, Chen Luo, Fang Liang, Chunhua Cai, Hengchang Bi, Xiaocong Lian, Xiangyang Ji, Qiubo Zhang, Litao Sun, Xing Wu
Nanotechnology (Journal), 2021

Services

Conference Reviewer: ICLR'25, AAAI'26, ICLR'26, ICML'26

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