Zirui Zhu

I am a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the National University of Singapore, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yang You. Before that, I received my B.Eng. in Electronics Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2022, where I was grateful to work with Prof. Yong Li and Prof. Xu Chen.

Research Interests: I develop structure-aware, resource-efficient methods for foundation models. My research studies how to exploit heterogeneity in data, inputs, and optimization to allocate limited compute, tokens, supervision, and model updates where they matter most. Recent work spans budgeted long-video understanding, confidence-gated reward modeling, and efficient LLM post-training.

I am open to research collaborations from both industry and academia. I am also seeking Summer 2026 research internships with the possibility of full-time conversion—feel free to reach out.

Email / CV / Scholar / Github / LinkedIn

News

May 2026: CAMEL was accepted to ICML 2026.

Experience

Research Intern, TikTok Pte. Ltd, Singapore, Apr 2025 – Apr 2026
Research Intern, 01.AI, Beijing, China, May 2024 – Jul 2024
Research Intern, Kuaishou Technology, Beijing, China, Sep 2021 – Feb 2022
Remote Research Assistant, The Robotics Institute, CMU, Jun 2021 – Mar 2022
Remote Research Assistant, BAIR Lab, UC Berkeley, Nov 2020 – Jun 2021
Research Assistant, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Apr 2019 – Sep 2020

Publications

Representative papers are highlighted.

	CAMEL: Confidence-Gated Reflection for Reward Modeling Zirui Zhu, Hailun Xu, Yang Luo, Yong Liu, Kanchan Sarkar, Kun Xu, Yang You ICML, 2026 paper
	FOCUS: Efficient Keyframe Selection for Long Video Understanding Zirui Zhu, Hailun Xu, Yang Luo, Yong Liu, Kanchan Sarkar, Zhenheng Yang, Yang You ICLR, 2026 paper / code
	SeedLoRA: A Fusion Approach to Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning Yong Liu, Di Fu, Shenggan Cheng, Zirui Zhu, Yang Luo, Minhao Cheng, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Yang You ICML, 2025 paper
	POME: Post Optimization Model Edit via Muon-style Projection Yong Liu, Di Fu, Yang Luo, Zirui Zhu, Minhao Cheng, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Yang You arXiv, 2025 paper / code
	MERIT: Maximum-normalized Element-wise Ratio for Language Model Large-batch Training Yang Luo, Zangwei Zheng, Ziheng Qin, Zirui Zhu, Yong Liu, Yang You ICML, 2025 paper / code
	Sparse MeZO: Less Parameters for Better Performance in Zeroth-Order LLM Fine-Tuning Yong Liu, Zirui Zhu, Chaoyu Gong, Minhao Cheng, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Yang You NeurIPS, 2025 paper / code
	Helen: Optimizing CTR Prediction Models with Frequency-wise Hessian Eigenvalue Regularization Zirui Zhu, Yong Liu, Zangwei Zheng, Huifeng Guo, Yang You WWW, 2024 paper / code
	How Does the Textual Information Affect the Retrieval of Multimodal In-Context Learning? Yang Luo, Zangwei Zheng, Zirui Zhu, Yang You EMNLP, 2024 paper / code
	Inhomogeneous Social Recommendation with Hyper-graph Convolutional Networks Zirui Zhu, Chen Gao, Xu Chen, Nian Li, Depeng Jin, Yong Li ICDE, 2022 paper / code
	Predicting Grasp Stability with Sim2Real Transfer from Tactile Sensing Zilin Si, Zirui Zhu, Arpit Agarwal, Stuart Anderson, Wenzhen Yuan IROS, 2022 paper / code

Adapted from the template by Jon Barron.