Qiran Zou

Qiran Zou

PhD Student  ·  ASI Lab, National University of Singapore

qiranzou [at] gmail [dot] com

Google Scholar GitHub

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

  • [2026] Our paper HypoSpace on evaluating LLMs as set-valued hypothesis generators is accepted to ICML 2026 (Spotlight).

Publications

FML-bench teaser
arXiv
FML-bench: Benchmarking Machine Learning Agents for Scientific Research
Qiran Zou, Hou Hei Lam, Wenhao Zhao, Yiming Tang, Tingting Chen, Samson Yu, Tianyi Zhang, Chang Liu, Xiangyang Ji, Dianbo Liu
arXiv preprint, 2025
arXiv Code
HypoSpace teaser
ICML 2026 Spotlight
HypoSpace: Evaluating LLM Creativity as Set-Valued Hypothesis Generators under Underdetermination
Tingting Chen, Beibei Lin, Zifeng Yuan, Qiran Zou, Hongyu He, Anirudh Goyal, Yew-Soon Ong, Dianbo Liu
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026. Spotlight.
arXiv Code Spotlight
LanSE teaser
arXiv
Human-like Content Analysis for Generative AI with Language-Grounded Sparse Encoders
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
arXiv
Representation Collapsing Problems in VQ teaser
NeurIPS Workshop
Representation Collapsing Problems in Vector Quantization
Zhao Wenhao*, Qiran Zou*, Rushi Shah, Dianbo Liu. (*equal contribution)
NeurIPS Safe Generative AI Workshop, 2024
arXiv
ParCo teaser
ECCV 2024
ParCo: Part-Coordinating Text-to-Motion Synthesis
Qiran Zou*, Shangyuan Yuan*, Yu Wang, Shian Du, Chang Liu, Yi Xu, Jie Chen, Xiangyang Ji. (*equal contribution)
ECCV 2024
PDF Code
ILSGAN teaser
AAAI 2023 Oral
ILSGAN: Independent Layer Synthesis for Unsupervised Foreground-Background Segmentation
Qiran Zou, Yu Yang, Wing Yin Cheung, Chang Liu, Xiangyang Ji
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023. Main Track.
PDF Code Oral Presentation
Improved Layered GANs teaser
WACV 2022
Learning Foreground-Background Segmentation from Improved Layered GANs
Yu Yang, Hakan Bilen, Qiran Zou, Wing Yin Cheung, Xiangyang Ji
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2022
PDF
CrTe2 paper teaser
Nanotechnology
Tailoring atomic 1T phase CrTe2 for in situ fabrication
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
PDF

Services

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

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