معرفی
Zhuowen Tu is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He leads the Machine Learning, Perception, and Cognition Lab (mlPC), where his research lies at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and neural computation, focusing on statistical models for structured, large-scale, and multi-modal data.
He received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and held faculty positions at UCLA before joining UCSD in 2013. He also served as a Lead Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia (2011–2013) and was an Amazon Scholar (2021–2022). His academic trajectory includes progression from Assistant to Associate and then Full Professor at UCSD.
His research interests span computer vision, deep learning, generative modeling, vision-language models, diffusion models, and structured prediction. He has made seminal contributions to image parsing, auto-context models, introspective neural networks, and holistically-nested edge detection. His recent work emphasizes Bayesian diffusion models, panoptic 3D parsing, and multimodal learning.
The analysis of his recent publications shows a strong trend toward diffusion-based generative modeling, particularly in 3D vision, image restoration, and vision-language tasks. He also continues to advance work in multimodal understanding, continual learning, and efficient transformers. His lab actively publishes in top venues such as CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, and TPAMI.
Selected Scientific Awards and Honors:
- IEEE Fellow
- David Marr Prize (2003)
- David Marr Prize Honorable Mention (2015)
- NSF CAREER Award (2009)
- Test-of-Time Award, AISTATS 2025 (for Deeply-Supervised Nets)
- First Prize, MICCAI Grand Challenge on Caudate Segmentation (2007)
- Talbert Abrams Award Honorable Mention (2003)
Advising and Grants: He has advised numerous PhD students who are now faculty at NYU, CMU, and Stanford, or research scientists at Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and Facebook. His lab has been supported by significant grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Northrop Grumman. Current and recent grants include NSF IIS-2433768 on Bayesian Diffusion Models and NSF IIS-2127544 on Panoptic 3D Parsing.
Laboratories and Teams: He leads the Machine Learning, Perception, and Cognition Lab (mlPC) at UCSD, which brings together students and researchers working on fundamental and applied problems in AI, vision, and cognition. The lab has strong collaborations with industry and other academic institutions.
