Ziniu (Michael) Zhang

I am a Ph.D student of Khoury College of Computer Sciences in Northeastern University starting from Fall 2024. I work with Prof. Hongyang R. Zhang. My name can be pronounced as "Tzu-niu Chang".

Before my PhD study, I was a visiting student in the University of Queensland advised by Prof. Yadan Luo and a research intern in MMLAB@NTU advised by Prof. Ziwei Liu.

I am extremely grateful to all professors, mentors, and friends who have helped me on my research journey.

I obtained my bachelor's degree in Computer Science (Honors College) from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in 2024.

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profile photo

Research

My research interests align with fundamental machine learning and data mining.

(* equal contributions)

Learning Multimodal Embeddings for Traffic Accident Prediction and Causal Estimation
Ziniu Zhang, Minxuan Duan, Haris N. Koutsopoulos, Hongyang R. Zhang
To appear in KDD 2026
Project / Paper

Linear-Time Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning via Gradient Estimation
Ziniu Zhang*, Zhenshuo Zhang*, Dongyue Li, Lu Wang, Jennifer Dy, Hongyang R. Zhang
EMNLP 2025
Project / Paper / Demo

Efficient Ensemble for Fine-tuning Language Models on Multiple Datasets
Dongyue Li, Ziniu Zhang, Lu Wang, Hongyang R. Zhang
ACL 2025
Project / Paper / Blog

Scalable Fine-tuning from Multiple Data Sources: A First-Order Approximation Approach
Dongyue Li*, Ziniu Zhang*, Lu Wang, Hongyang R. Zhang
EMNLP 2024 (Findings)
Project / Paper

MMInA: Benchmarking Multihop Multimodal Internet Agents
Shulin Tian*, Ziniu Zhang*, Liangyu Chen*, Ziwei Liu
ACL 2025 (Findings)
Project / Paper / Demo

Awards

- Silver medal in the 47th ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest Asian Regional (Rank: 48/511)
- Silver medal in the 8th China Collegiate Programming Contest (CCPC).
- Bronze medal in the 7th China Collegiate Programming Contest (CCPC).
- First Prize in the 23rd National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces (NOIP) (Senior group).
- Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award, UESTC.
- Scholarship for Overseas Visiting Student Program, UESTC.
- First-class Student Scholarship, UESTC.

Service

- Reviewer: AAAI (2025), AISTATS (2025, 2026), DMLR (2024, 2025), TMLR (2026).
- Teaching Assistant: DS 5220 Supervised Machine Learning and Learning Theory, Northeastern University.
- Volunteer in the 10th China Collegiate Programming Contest (CCPC) Final.
- Member of the technical group of 2021 National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces (NOIP).

Appendix

- I'm addicted to badminton and have won several medals in UESTC. My favorite players are Lee Chong Wei and Shi Yu Qi.
- I'm also passionate about cycling. I have completed several routes exceeding 100 km. My goal is to cycle along G318 to Lhasa.
- I served as the major volunteer in 31st FISU World University Games.
- Happy to make friends and connect with people! My Chinese name is 张子牛. I was born in Wuhu, a beautiful city by the Yangtze River. My WeChat ID is MichaelZona.

Last update: 12/4/2025

Credit to Jon Barron.