Chenhao Zhang | Huazhong University of Science and Technology

About Me

Hi there! I am a senior undergraduate at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (B.S. in Intelligent Science and Technology, 2023 - 2027), originally from Taipei, Taiwan. I am currently a research intern at Tencent Hunyuan with Tianyu Pang, and at VisionX Lab, NYU Courant with Prof. Saining Xie, where I spent Fall 2025 as an exchange student. Previously I worked at OpenDILab, Shanghai AI Lab with Yazhe Niu, and at CAS-SIAT with Prof. Min Yang.

Let's Connect

I am applying for CS PhD programs starting Fall 2027, focused on vision-centric multimodal reasoning and visual agents. I am also open to long-term research internships and collaborations in the meantime — if you are working on any of the above, I would like to hear from you.

leo.chenhaozhang@gmail.com ch_zhang@hust.edu.cn @Chenhao_Zhang5

💬Research Interests

Vision-Centric Multimodal Perception & Reasoning: Long-horizon visual reasoning, Video and spatial perception, Visual representation learning, Visual state tracking and memory.
Visual Agents & Multimodal RL: Thinking with images, Tool-augmented pixel operations, Explicit visual state representations, RL post-training, and reliable Evaluation.
Emotional Intelligence & Human-Centered AI: Mental World Model, Emotion reasoning for decision-making, Emotion as long-horizon state compression, and Evaluation across social, cultural, and mental-health domains.

What I Believe

I work on the gap between what a model sees and what it understands. Today’s VLMs can name what is visible yet miss what matters: implication, spatial state, and how that state changes over time. My work traces this gap from benchmarks that expose it to visual reinforcement learning that begins to close it.

I believe vision still lacks what code became for language models: a training ground where long-horizon work is grounded in real scenes, outcomes are verifiable, and skills transfer. Building it requires agents that preserve and revise visual state over time, use tools to inspect the world, and learn from their actions. But perception and memory are not enough. Long-horizon intelligence also needs an experience-shaped value signal that guides action before deliberation is complete. Humans have such a signal: emotion. My goal is to build vision-centric agents that see, remember, reason, and make decisions in the real world.

🔥News

Jun 2026 I will attend ICML 2026 @Seoul, please feel free to connect with me!
Apr 2026 I have joined Tencent Hunyuan in Shenzhen as a Qingyun Talent Program Research Intern, working on multimodal evaluation and long-horizon agents!
Apr 2026 OpenDILab, the project I core contribute to, already has 30K+ Stars!
Mar 2026 Our paper Let Androids Dream of Electric Sheep has been accepted to CVPR 2026 CogVL, check it out!
Feb 2026 I'm honored to be invited to be the Qinyuan member of Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)!
Feb 2026 We preprint MetaphorStar on arXiv, check it out!
Oct 2025 I have arrived in NYC and started an on-site research internship at NYU Courant, advised by Prof. Saining Xie. Looking forward to the exciting research ahead!
Oct 2025 I'm so happy to win Baosteel Scholarship 2025!
Jun 2025 I'm so happy to be 1/30 of SenseTime Scholarship 2025! Thank you, SenseTime!!!
May 2025 I'm honored to be invited to be a reviewer of EMNLP 2025!
May 2025 We preprint Let Androids Dream of Electric Sheep on arXiv, check it out!
May 2025 Our paper CII-Bench has been accepted to ACL 2025 Main, check it out!
Apr 2025 I'm honored to be invited to be a reviewer of NeurIPS 2025!
Feb 2025 I'm honored to be invited to be a reviewer of ACL 2025!
Jan 2025 It's my great honor to join VisionX Lab as a student intern, advised by Prof. Saining Xie!
Jan 2025 Our project EmoLLM has owned 1K+ Stars!
Jan 2025 I'm honored to be invited to be the hack lead of Spark Lab S2, let's make something big!
Dec 2024 I will attend NeurIPS 2024 @Vancouver, please feel free to connect with me!
Nov 2024 Our paper CPsyExam has been accepted to COLING 2025, check it out!
Oct 2024 We preprint CII-Bench on arXiv, check it out!
Sep 2024 Our paper II-Bench has been accepted to NeurIPS 2024 Datasets & Benchmarks, check it out!
Aug 2024 I'm honored to be invited to be a reviewer of ICLR 2025!
Aug 2024 I will attend ACL 2024 @Bangkok, please feel free to connect with me!
Jul 2024 We have a short talk about CPsyCoun at AI TIME, check it out!
Jun 2024 We preprint II-Bench on arXiv, check it out!
Jun 2024 We have a long talk about CPsyCoun in Shanghai AI Lab, check it out!
May 2024 Our paper CPsyCoun has been accepted to ACL 2024 Findings, check it out!
Apr 2024 Mini-Sora has owned 1K+ Stars (my first time)!
Mar 2024 EmoLLM, the project I lead, won the Innovation and Creativity Award in the 2024 Puyuan Large Language Model Series Challenge Competition (Spring) held by the Shanghai AI Lab!
Mar 2024 Mini-Sora, the project I co-lead, has owned 900+ Stars and has been posted on GitHub Trendings for two days continuously!
Mar 2024 We preprint GraphInstruct on arXiv, check it out!

📝Publications & Preprints

arXiv

MetaphorStar: Image Metaphor Understanding and Reasoning with End-to-End Visual Reinforcement Learning

RL Post-TrainingMultimodal ReasoningImage Metaphor

Chenhao Zhang, Yazhe Niu†, Hongsheng Li†

arXiv preprint, 2026.

PDF Code Project Page Under Review

CVPR'26 CogVL

Let Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: A Human-Inspired Image Implication Understanding and Reasoning Framework

Thinking with ImagesMultimodal ReasoningImage Implication

Chenhao Zhang, Yazhe Niu†

Cognitive Foundations for Multimodal Models Workshop at CVPR, 2026.

PDF Code Under Review

ACL'25

Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images?

Multimodal BenchmarkImage ImplicationCultural Reasoning

Chenhao Zhang, Xi Feng, Yuelin Bai, Xinrun Du, Jinchang Hou, Kaixin Deng, Guangzeng Han, Qinrui Li, Bingli Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xingwei Qu, Yifei Zhang, Qixuan Zhao, Yiming Liang, Ziqiang Liu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Wenhao Huang, Chenghua Lin, Ge Zhang†, Shiwen Ni†

The Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025.

PDF Code Project Page

NeurIPS'24

II-Bench: An Image Implication Understanding Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal BenchmarkImage ImplicationTheory of Mind

Ziqiang Liu* Feiteng Fang*, Xi Feng*, Xinrun Du*, Chenhao Zhang*, Zekun Wang, Yuelin Bai, Qixuan Zhao, Liyang Fan, Chengguang Gan, Hongquan Lin, Jiaming Li, Yuansheng Ni, Haihong Wu, Yaswanth Narsupalli, Zhigang Zheng, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Xiaojun Chen, Min Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Ruibo Liu, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang†, Shiwen Ni†

The Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2024.

PDF Code Project Page

ACL'24

CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counseling

Emotional IntelligenceMental HealthDialogue Reconstruction

Chenhao Zhang, Renhao Li, Minghuan Tan†, Min Yang†, Jingwei Zhu, Di Yang, Jiahao Zhao, Guancheng Ye, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu

The Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Findings, 2024.

PDF Code

COLING'25

CPsyExam: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Psychology using Examinations

Emotional IntelligenceMental HealthDomain Benchmark

Jiahao Zhao, Jingwei Zhu, Minghuan Tan†, Min Yang†, Di Yang, Chenhao Zhang, Guancheng Ye, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu

The International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2025.

PDF Code Project Page

FCS'25

GraphInstruct: Empowering Large Language Models with Graph Understanding and Reasoning Capability

Logical ReasoningGraph ReasoningInstruction Tuning

Zihan Luo, Xiran Song, Hong Huang†, Jianxun Lian, Chenhao Zhang, Jinqi Jiang, Xing Xie, Hai Jin

Frontiers of Computer Science (FCS), 2025. (CCF-T1)

PDF Code

⚔️Projects

Research in progress: VisAblate Development Status — an evidence-first visual-agent harness with audited identity/orientation gates, tracked baseline defects, and task-by-task independent review.
Research in progress: Benchmark-First Development Status — a scene-disjoint image/video benchmark with audited supply gates, deterministic manifests, and matched open/closed model baselines.
Leader of EmoLLM , large language models for mental health. Built the end-to-end framework spanning data construction, post-training, evaluation and deployment. Post-trained 20+ LLMs (7B–32B) with SFT, OPD, and RL (DPO, PPO, GRPO, etc.), and scaled it to one of China’s largest LLM-for-mental-health communities (15k+ users).
Co-Leader of Mini-Sora , a community aims to explore the implementation path and future development direction of Sora.
Core Contributor of OpenDILab , the first decision intelligence platform covering the most comprehensive RL algorithms and applications both in academia and industry. Contributed to LightRFT — RLHF/RLVR fine-tuning for LLMs and VLMs over vLLM and SGLang backends with FSDP2/ZeRO sharding — and to the core frameworks DI-engine and LightZero.
Core Contributor of Awesome LLM Strawberry , a collection of LLM papers, blogs, and projects, with a focus on OpenAI o1 and reasoning techniques. Led the literature review on LLM reasoning and thinking with images.
Core Contributor of Awesome RLHF , a collection of research papers for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), one of four curated surveys I maintain on RLHF, RLVR, UI/GUI agents and exploration in RL.
Core Contributor of Tianji , a project about large language models (LLMs) and human social skills.
Contributor of InternLM , a community of high-quality LLMs as well as a full-stack toolchain for development and application.
Contributor of verl , a flexible, efficient and production-ready RL training library for large language models (LLMs).
Contributor of OpenMMLab-mmagic , an open-source toolbox about image and video editing&generating based on PyTorch.

💼Education & Experience

Education

NYU Courant

Undergraduate Exchange Student, Computer Science

New York, NY, USA

Sep. 2025 - Jan. 2026

Huazhong University of Science and Technology

B.S. in Intelligent Science and Technology

Wuhan, China

Sep. 2023 - Jul. 2027 (expected)

Research Experience

Tencent Hunyuan

Qingyun Talent Program Research Intern

Supervised by Tianyu Pang

Focus: Multimodal evaluation, Multimodal RL post-training, Long-horizon visual agent harnesses, Video generation.

Apr. 2026 - Present

VisionX Lab, NYU Courant

Research Intern

Supervised by Prof. Saining Xie

Focus: Thinking with images, Spatial intelligence, Explicit visual states, Visual state tracking and memory, Multi-step visual inference.

Jan. 2025 - Present

OpenDILab, Shanghai AI Lab

Research Intern

Supervised by Yazhe Niu, Chaochao Lu and Prof. Hongsheng Li

Focus: Multimodal RL post-training, Agentic RL for long-horizon trajectories, Latent world models, Open-source RL infrastructure.

Jun. 2024 - Jun. 2026

High Performance Data Mining Lab, CAS-SIAT

Research Assistant

Supervised by Minghuan Tan, Prof. Shiwen Ni and Prof. Min Yang

Focus: Multimodal benchmarks, Image implication understanding, Human-centered evaluation of language models.

Aug. 2023 - Dec. 2024

Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, HUST

Research Intern

Supervised by Prof. Hong Huang and Prof. Hai Jin

Focus: Graph understanding and reasoning, Instruction tuning for large language models.

Apr. 2023 - Dec. 2023

🏆Honors & Awards

2025 SenseTime Scholarship, SenseTime (Top 30 undergraduates nationwide, <0.01%)
2025 Baosteel Scholarship, Baosteel Education Foundation (Top 0.1% nationwide, 509 awardees)
2024 China National Scholarship, Top Prize, Ministry of Education, China (Top 60 awardees nationwide)
2024 NeurIPS Scholar Award
2024 Innovation and Creativity Award, Shanghai AI Lab & GDC (Top 5/122)
2023 2nd Place, iFLYTEK AI Developer Competition (2/2682)
2023 Best Creativity Award, ZhenFund & SegmentFault & Monica Hackathon (1/80+)
2023 Global Rank 6th, Founder Park & Zilliz & ZhipuAI Global Hackathon (6/240+)

💡Talks & Reports

2026青源学术年会成功举办，青年力量共探“走向世界的模型” - Interview by BAAI
2025商汤奖学金公布！30位“AI新星”亮相 - Interview by SenseTime
ACL 2025 Talk：Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? - Interview by AI TIME
ACL 2024 Talk：CPsyCoun - Interview by AI TIME
当大模型遇上心理咨询：基于心理咨询报告的对话重构和评测框架CPsyCoun - Interview by Shanghai AI Lab
大模型创意无限：异彩纷呈的GLMs个性化智能体带来全新体验 - Interview by Zhipu.ai

🎓Services

Conference Reviewer

Community

Shanghai AI Lab & InternLM Camp Teaching Assistant (TA)
BAAI Qinyuan Member
M-A-P Research Group Member
HuggingFace China Member
OpenMMLab Member
DataWhale Member
AI TIME Member
SparkLab S2 HackLead