Zirui Zhu

PhD candidate in Computer Science at NUS

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 welcome collaborations and discussions of all kinds—feel free to reach out anytime!

News

Jul 2026 Received the NUS Research Achievement Award!
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
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
MatchLM2Lite: A Scalable MLLM-to-Lite Framework for Reproduced Content Identification
Xiaotian Fan, Hiok Hian Ong, David Yuchen Wang, Zirui Zhu, Kanchan Sarkar, Kun Xu

KDD 2026 paper
MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching
David Yuchen Wang, Haoying Li, Hailun Xu, Wei Chee Yew, Zirui Zhu, Sanjay Saha, Hei Hao, Kanchan Sarkar, Kun Xu

KDD 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
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
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
SeedFT: Structure-Preserving Fusion for Multi-Seed LLM Fine-Tuning
Yong Liu, Di Fu, Hailun Xu, Yang Luo, Zirui Zhu, Kanchan Sarkar, Zhenheng Yang, Minhao Cheng, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Yang You

Preprint 2025 paper
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
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
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
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
Predicting Grasp Stability with Sim2Real Transfer from Tactile Sensing
Zilin Si, Zirui Zhu, Arpit Agarwal, Stuart Anderson, Wenzhen Yuan

IROS 2022 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

Beyond Research

Off the clock, I am an avid tennis player 🎾 with 12+ years on court. At Tsinghua, I captained the EE department's tennis team and led it to the Ma Yuehan Cup team championship, the university's top campus sports title. Always up for some rallies if you are around!