Hi there! I am Dong Zhang (张冬)

I am now a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where I work closely with Prof. Kwang-Ting Cheng. I also collaborate closely with InnoHK AI Chip Center for Smart Emerging Systems (ACCESS) as a Senior Research Scientist. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of CSE of HKUST from Jan. 2022 to Nov. 2023. Before joining HKUST, I earned my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, where I was supervised by Prof. Jinhui Tang. From Sep. 2018 to Sep. 2020, I was supported by the China Scholarship Council as a joint Ph.D. student at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, under the supervision of Prof. Hanwang Zhang and Prof. Qianru Sun.

My primary research interests are in machine learning, computer vision, and medical image analysis, with a focus on fundamental research tasks such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and pose estimation. In addition, my research interests are also centered on efficient network architecture design for edge devices perception, with an emphasis on developing integrated visual recognition systems tailored for applications such as healthcare and wellness analysis.

We are seeking self-motivated Research Assistants and Postdoctoral Researchers who are interested in working on large-scale multi-modal foundation models and medical image analysis. We have a highly professional team, abundant computational resources, and offer very competitive salaries. If you are interested, please email me. Thanks!

I would like to express heartfelt thanks to my beloved cat, ERLING (二零 in chinese), who was by my side throughout my doctoral journey. Sadly, ERLING passed away in a car accident in Dec. 2023. Although she was just a cat, her presence brought me comfort during many anxious and sleepless nights. I am forever grateful for her companionship and will always cherish the memories we shared.

🔥 News

📝 Publications

* denotes co-first authors. # denotes corresponding author.

Selected Publications

arxiv

BREAD: Boundary and Relation Distillation for Semantic Segmentation

Dong Zhang, Pingcheng Dong, Xinting Hu, Long Chen, and Kwang-Ting Cheng.

arXiv, 2024.

IJCV

CAE-GReaT: Convolutional-Auxiliary Efficient Graph Reasoning Transformer for Dense Image Predictions

Dong Zhang, Yi Lin, Jinhui Tang, and Kwang-Ting Cheng.

International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), 2023.

SCIS

Augmented FCN: Rethinking Context Modeling for Semantic Segmentation

Dong Zhang, Liyan Zhang, and Jinhui Tang.

SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences (SCIS), 2023.

arXiv

Understanding the Tricks of Deep Learning in Medical Image Segmentation: Challenges and Future Directions

Dong Zhang, Yi Lin, Hao Chen, Zhuotao Tian, Xin Yang, Jinhui Tang, and Kwang Ting Cheng.

arXiv, 2022.

ACM MM

Graph Reasoning Transformer for Image Parsing.

Dong Zhang, Jinhui Tang, and Kwang-Ting Cheng.

ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2022.

PR

Unabridged Adjacent Modulation for Clothing Parsing

Dong Zhang, Chengting Zuo, Qianhao Wu, Liyong Fu, and Xinguang Xiang.

Pattern Recognition (PR), 2022.

ICCV

Self-Regulation for Semantic Segmentation

Dong Zhang, Hanwang Zhang, Jinhui Tang, Xiansheng Hua, and Qianru Sun.

International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021.

NeurIPS

Causal Intervention for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Dong Zhang, Hanwang Zhang, Jinhui Tang, Xiansheng Hua, and Qianru Sun.

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS oral), 2020.

ECCV

Feature Pyramid Transformer

Dong Zhang, Hanwang Zhang, Jinhui Tang, Meng Wang, Xiansheng Hua, and Qianru Sun. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.

TCYB

Recursive Discriminative Subspace Learning with L1-norm Distance Constraint

Dong Zhang, Yunlian Sun, Qiaolin Ye, and Jinhui Tang.

IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (TCYB), 2018.

2025:

• Xixi Jiang, Dong Zhang, Xiang Li, Kangyi Liu, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Xin Yang. Labeled-to-Unlabeled Distribution Alignment for Partially-Supervised Multi-Organ Medical Image Segmentation. Medical Image Analysis, 2025.
• Pingcheng Dong, Yonghao Tan, Xuejiao Liu, Peng Luo, Yu Liu, Luhong Liang, Yitong Zhou, Di Pang, Manto Yung, Dong Zhang, Xijie Huang, Shih-Yang Liu, Yongkun Wu, Fengshi Tian, Chi-Ying Tsui, Fengbin Tu, Kwang-Ting Cheng. A 28nm 0.22μJ/Token Memory-Compute-Intensity-Aware CNN-Transformer Accelerator with Hybrid-Attention-Based Layer-Fusion and Cascaded Pruning for Semantic Segmentation. IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), 2025.

2024:

• Shuhan Li, Dong Zhang, Xiaomeng Li, Chubin Ou, Lin An, Yanwu Xu, Weihua Yang, Yanchun Zhang, Kwang-Ting Cheng. Vessel-Promoted OCT to OCTA Image Translation by Heuristic Contextual Constraints. Medical Image Analysis, 2024.
• Yangjun Mao, Jun Xiao, Dong Zhang, Meng Cao, Jian Shao, Yueting Zhuang, and Long Chen. Improving Reference-based Distinctive Image Captioning with Contrastive Rewards. ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM), 2024.
• Chunyan Wang, Dong Zhang#, and Rui Yan. Boosting Weakly-Supervised Image Segmentation via Representation, Transform, and Compensator. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2024.
• Peng Xing, Dong Zhang, Jinhui Tang, and Zechao Li. A Recover-then-Discriminate Framework for Robust Anomaly Detection. SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences (SCIS), 2024.
• Xiao Fang, Yi Lin, Dong Zhang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, and Hao Chen. Aligning Medical Images with General Knowledge from Large Language Models. Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI Early Accept, Oral), 2024.
• Fengyun Wang, Qianru Sun, Dong Zhang, and Jinhui Tang. Unleashing Network Potentials for Semantic Scene Completion. The IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2024.
• Yi Lin, Zeyu Wang, Dong Zhang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, and Hao Chen. BoNuS: Boundary Mining for Nuclei Segmentation with Partial Point Labels. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), 2024.
• Qianhao Wu, Jiaxin Qi, Dong Zhang, Hanwang Zhang, Jinhui Tang. Fine-Tuning for Few-shot Image Classification by Multimodal Prototype Regularization. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), 2024.
• Pingcheng Dong, Yonghao Tan, Dong Zhang, Tianwei Ni, Xuejiao Liu, Yu Liu, Peng Luo, Luhong Liang, Shih-Yang Liu, Xijie Huang, Huaiyu Zhu, Yun Pan, Fengwei An, and Kwang-Ting Cheng. Genetic Quantization-Aware Approximation for Non-Linear Operations in Transformers. ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC Oral), 2024.
• Pingcheng Dong, Yonghao Tan, Dong Zhang, Yongkun Wu, Xijie Huang, Shih-Yang Liu, Yu Liu, Xuejiao Liu, Peng Luo, Luhong Liang, Fengwei An, and Kwang-Ting Cheng. Additive Partial Sum Quantization. ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2024.

2023:

• Zenan Shi, Haipeng Chen, and Dong Zhang#. Transformer-Auxiliary Neural Networks for Image Manipulation Localization by Operator Inductions. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2023.
• Zenan Shi, Haipeng Chen, Long Chen, and Dong Zhang#. Discrepancy-Guided Reconstruction Learning for Image Forgery Detection. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2023.
• Dong Liang, Dong Zhang, Qiong Wang, Zongqi Wei, and Liyan Zhang. CrossNet: Cross-Scene Background Subtraction Network via 3D Optical Flow. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), 2023.
• Yi Lin, Dong Zhang, Xiao Fang, Yufan Chen, Kwang-Ting Cheng, and Hao Chen. Rethinking Boundary Detection in Deep Learning Models for Medical Image Segmentation. Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI), 2023.
• Chunyan Wang, Dong Zhang, Liyan Zhang, and Jinhui Tang. Coupling Global Context and Local Contents for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2023.
• Yu Quan, Dong Zhang, Liyan Zhang, and Jinhui Tang. Centralized Feature Pyramid for Object Detection. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2023..
• Fengyun Wang, Dong Zhang, Hanwang Zhang, Jinhui Tang, Qianru Sun. Semantic Scene Completion with Cleaner Self. The IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2023.
• Jeffry Wicaksana, Zengqiang Yan, Dong Zhang, Xijie Huang, Huimin Wu, Xin Yang, and Kwang-Ting Cheng. FedMix: Mixed Supervised Federated Learning for Medical Image Segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), 2023.
• Yuchen Shen, Dong Zhang, Yuhui Zheng, Zechao Li, Liyong Fu, and Qiaolin Ye. Training-Free Instance Segmentation from Semantic Image Segmentation Masks. arXiv, 2023.
• Yi Lin, Xiao Fang, Dong Zhang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, and Hao Chen. A Permutable Hybrid Network for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation. arXiv, 2023.

2022 and before:

• Zenan Shi, Haipeng Chen, Dong Zhang, and Xuanjing Shen. Pretraining-Driven Multimodal Boundary Aware Vision Transformer. Journal of Software (in Chinese), 2022.
• Yangjun Mao, Long Chen, Zhihong Jiang, Dong Zhang, Zhimeng Zhang, Jian Shao, and Jun Xiao. Rethinking the Reference-based Distinctive Image Captioning. ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2022.
• Liyong Fu, Dong Zhang, and Qiaolin Ye. Recurrent Thrifty Attention Network for Remote Sensing Scene Recognition. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2020.
• Long Chen, Chujie Lu, Siliang Tang, Jun Xiao, and Dong Zhang, et al. Rethinking the Bottom-Up Framework for Query-based Video Localization. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI oral), 2020.
• Wenxuan Zhang, Dong Zhang, and Xinguang Xiang. Cascaded and Dual: Discrimination Oriented Network for Brain Tumor Classification. Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML spotlight), 2019.
• Dong Zhang, Nan Li, and Qiaolin Ye. Positional Context Aggregation Network for Remote Sensing Scene Classification. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 2019.

📖 Professional Service

• Journal Reviewers:
  • IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
  • IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
  • IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
  • IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
  • IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
  • IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
  • IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technolog
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
  • Neurocomputing, Neural Networks, Pattern Recognition
• Conference Reviewers:
  • European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
  • ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM)
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
  • Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
  • The International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
  • The IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR)
• Guest Editor:
  • Special Issue on “Deep Learning in Computer Vision”, Journal of Imaging
• Invited Talks:
  • Graph-Based Vision Transformer, RoboAICon2023, 2023
  • GReaT for Pixel-Level Image Parsing, 智东西公开课, 2022
  • 基于因果干预的弱监督图像语义分割, TechBeat, 2020
  • Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation, Damo Academy, 2020

🎖 Honors and Awards

• Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award at NJUST, 2023
• Best Paper Award at LTDL Workshop in IJCAI, 2021
• Scholarship from CSC, 2018
• National Scholarships, 2016
• Academic Scholarship at NJFU and NJUST, 2015-2017
• Best Paper Award Runner-Up, 2015