Kaiwen Zhou

News

• [03/2026] I joined Knowin AI as Director of Algorithms & Research Scientist!
• [02/2026] 3 Papers accepted at CVPR 2026!
• [01/2026] Our work "Consistency Flow Model Achieves One-step Denoising Error Correction Codes" won the Best Paper Award at AAAI ML4Wireless workshop!
• [11/2025] 3 Papers accepted at AAAI 2026 (one oral)!
• [10/2025] Actively seeking self-motivated PhD students, Postdoctoral Fellows, and Research Assistants (RAs).
• [09/2025] I left Huawei and joined Prof. Hong Cheng's Group at SEEM, the Chinese University of Hong Kong!
• [02/2023] I joined Huawei Noah's Ark Lab as a principal research scientist (Huawei Top Minds)!

Publications

 (*indicates equal contribution)

1. HiconAgent: History Context-aware Policy Optimization for GUI Agents [paper]
   Xurui Zhou, Gongwei Chen, Yuquan Xie, Zaijing Li, Kaiwen Zhou, Shuai Wang, Shuo Yang, Zhuotao Tian, Rui Shao
   In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026.
   
2. HATS : Hardness-Aware Trajectory Synthesis for GUI Agents
   Rui Shao, Ruize Gao, Bin Xie, Li Yixing, Kaiwen Zhou, Shuai Wang, Weili Guan, Gongwei Chen
   In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026.
   
3. A Unified Perspective on Adversarial Membership Manipulation in Vision Models
   Ruize Gao, Kaiwen Zhou, Yongqiang Chen, Feng Liu
   In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026.
   
4. SemanticVLA: Semantic-Aligned Sparsification and Enhancement for Efficient Robotic Manipulation [paper]
   Wei Li, Renshan Zhang, Rui Shao, Zhijian Fang, Kaiwen Zhou, Zhuotao Tian, Liqiang Nie
   In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Oral, 2026.
   
5. A²Flow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation via Self-Adaptive Abstraction Operators [paper]
   Mingming Zhao, Xiaokang Wei, Yuanqi Shao, Kaiwen Zhou, Lin Yang, Siwei Rao, Junhui Zhan, Zhitang Chen
   In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026.
   
6. Boosting Cross-problem Generalization in Diffusion-Based Neural Combinatorial Solver via Inference Time Adaptation [paper]
   Haoyu Lei, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Zhitang Chen, Farzan Farnia
   In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026.
   
7. Consistency Flow Model Achieves One-step Denoising Error Correction Codes [paper]
   Haoyu Lei, Chin Wa Lau, Kaiwen Zhou, Nian Guo, Farzan Farnia
   In AAAI Workshop on Machine Learning for Wireless Communication and Networks (AAAI ML4Wireless), Best Paper Award, 2026.
   
8. GUI-G1: Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training for Visual Grounding in GUI Agents [paper]
   Yuqi Zhou, Sunhao Dai, Shuai Wang, Kaiwen Zhou, Qinglin Jia, Jun Xu
   In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025.
   
9. MESH - Understanding Videos Like Human: Measuring Hallucinations in Large Video Models [paper]
   Garry YANG, Zizhe Chen, Man Hon WONG, Haoyu LEI, Yongqiang Chen, Zhenguo Li, Kaiwen Zhou, James Cheng
   In ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), 2025.
   
10. Less is More: Empowering GUI Agent with Context-Aware Simplification [paper]
    Gongwei Chen, Xurui Zhou, Rui Shao, Yibo Lyu, Kaiwen Zhou, Shuai Wang, WenTao Li, Yinchuan Li, Zhongang Qi, Liqiang Nie.
    In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Highlight, 2025.
    
11. FALCON: Resolving Visual Redundancy and Fragmentation in High-resolution Multimodal Large Language Models via Visual Registers [paper]
    Renshan Zhang, Rui Shao, Gongwei Chen, Miao Zhang, Kaiwen Zhou, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie.
    In International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.
    
12. GUI-explorer: Autonomous Exploration and Mining of Transition-aware Knowledge for GUI Agent [paper]
    Bin Xie, Rui Shao, Gongwei Chen, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Jie Liu, Min Zhang, Liqiang Nie.
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025.
    
13. SPA-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for SmartPhone Agent Evaluation [paper] [github]
    Jingxuan Chen, Derek Yuen, Bin Xie, Yuhao Yang, Gongwei Chen, Zhihao Wu, Li Yixing, Xurui Zhou, Weiwen Liu, Shuai Wang, Kaiwen Zhou, Rui Shao, Liqiang Nie, Yasheng Wang, Jianye Hao, Jun Wang, Kun Shao.
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Spotlight 5.1%, 2025.
    
14. VideoAgent2: Enhancing the LLM-Based Agent System for Long-Form Video Understanding by Uncertainty-Aware CoT [paper]
    Zhuo Zhi, Qiangqiang Wu, Wenbo Li, Yinchuan Li, Kun Shao, Kaiwen Zhou.
    In NeurIPS Workshop on Scaling Environments for Agents (NeurIPS SEA), Oral, 2025.
    
15. HORSE: Hierarchical Representation for Large-Scale Neural Subset Selection [paper]
    Binghui Xie, Yixuan Wang, Yongqiang Chen, Kaiwen Zhou, Yu Li, Wei Meng, James Cheng.
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.
    
16. RestoreAgent: Autonomous Image Restoration Agent via Multimodal Large Language Models [paper]
    Haoyu Chen, Wenbo Li, Jinjin Gu, Jingjing Ren, Sixiang Chen, Tian Ye, Renjing Pei, Kaiwen Zhou, Fenglong Song, Lei Zhu.
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.
    
17. Enhancing Neural Subset Selection: Integrating Background Information into Set Representations [paper]
    Binghui Xie, Yatao Bian, Kaiwen Zhou, Yongqiang Chen, Peilin Zhao, Bo Han, Wei Meng, James Cheng.
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
    
18. Enhancing Evolving Domain Generalization through Dynamic Latent Representations [paper]
    Binghui Xie, Yongqiang Chen, Jiaqi Wang, Kaiwen Zhou, Bo Han, Wei Meng, James Cheng.
    In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Oral 2.2%, 2024.
    
19. Efficient Private SCO for Heavy-Tailed Data via Averaged Clipping [paper]
    Chenhan Jin, Kaiwen Zhou, Bo Han, James Cheng, Tieyong Zeng.
    In Machine Learning (MLJ), 2024.
    
20. Understanding and Improving Composite Bayesian Optimization [paper]
    Kaiwen Zhou*, Binghui Xie*, Junlong Lyu, Zhitang Chen.
    In AAAI Workshop on Learnable Optimization (AAAI LEANOPT), 2024.
    
21. Understanding and Improving Feature Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization [paper] [github]
    Yongqiang Chen*, Wei Huang*, Kaiwen Zhou*, Yatao Bian, Bo Han, James Cheng.
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023;
    Also appeared in ICLR Workshop on Domain Generalization (Spotlight), 2023.
    And ICML Workshop on Spurious Correlations, Invariance and Stability, 2023.
    
22. Does Invariant Graph Learning via Environment Augmentation Learn Invariance? [paper] [github]
    Yongqiang Chen, Yatao Bian, Kaiwen Zhou, Binghui Xie, Bo Han, James Cheng.
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023;
    Also appeared in ICLR Workshop on Domain Generalization (Spotlight), 2023.
    
23. Pareto Invariant Risk Minimization: Towards Mitigating The Optimization Dilemma in Out-of-Distribution Generalization [paper] [github]
    Yongqiang Chen, Kaiwen Zhou, Yatao Bian, Binghui Xie and others.
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023;
    Also appeared in ICLR Workshop on Domain Generalization (Oral), 2023;
    And ICML Workshop on Principles of Distribution Shift, 2022.
24. A Novel Extrapolation Technique to Accelerate WMMSE [paper]
    Kaiwen Zhou, Zhilin Chen, Guochen Liu, Zhitang Chen.
    In IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023.
25. On the Finite-Time Complexity and Practical Computation of Approximate Stationarity Concepts of Lipschitz Functions [paper]
    Lai Tian, Kaiwen Zhou, Anthony Man-Cho So.
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022.
26. Fast and Reliable Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness with Minimum-Margin Attack [paper]
    Ruize Gao, Jiongxiao Wang, Kaiwen Zhou, Feng Liu, Binghui Xie, Gang Niu, Bo Han, James Cheng.
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022.
27. Accelerating Perturbed Stochastic Iterates in Asynchronous Lock-Free Optimization [paper]
    Kaiwen Zhou, Anthony Man-Cho So, James Cheng.
    In NeurIPS Workshop on Optimization for Machine Learning (NeurIPS OPT), 2022.
28. Practical Schemes for Finding Near-Stationary Points of Convex Finite-Sums [paper]
    Kaiwen Zhou, Lai Tian, Anthony Man-Cho So, James Cheng.
    In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2022.
29. Boosting First-Order Methods by Shifting Objective: New Schemes with Faster Worst-Case Rates [paper]
    Kaiwen Zhou, Anthony Man-Cho So, James Cheng.
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020.
30. Amortized Nesterov's Momentum: A Robust Momentum and Its Application to Deep Learning [paper] [code]
    Kaiwen Zhou, Yanghua Jin, Qinghua Ding, James Cheng.
    In Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2020.
31. Tight Convergence Rate of Gradient Descent for Eigenvalue Computation [paper]
    Qinghua Ding, Kaiwen Zhou, James Cheng.
    In International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2020.
32. Convolutional Embedding for Edit Distance [paper] [github]
    Xinyan Dai, Xiao Yan, Kaiwen Zhou, Yuxuan Wang, Han Yang, James Cheng.
    In International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2020.
33. Direct Acceleration of SAGA using Sampled Negative Momentum [paper]
    Kaiwen Zhou, Qinghua Ding, Fanhua Shang, James Cheng, Danli Li, Zhi-Quan Luo.
    In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2019.
34. A Simple Stochastic Variance Reduced Algorithm with Fast Convergence Rates [paper]
    Kaiwen Zhou, Fanhua Shang, James Cheng.
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2018.
35. Guaranteed Sufficient Decrease for Stochastic Variance Reduced Gradient Optimization [paper]
    Fanhua Shang, Yuanyuan Liu, Kaiwen Zhou, James Cheng, Kelvin Kai Wing Ng, Yuichi Yoshida.
    In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2018.
36. VR-SGD: A Simple Stochastic Variance Reduction Method for Machine Learning [paper]
    Fanhua Shang, Kaiwen Zhou, Hongying Liu, James Cheng, Ivor Tsang, Lijun Zhang, Dacheng Tao, Licheng Jiao.
    In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2018.
37. ASVRG: Accelerated Proximal SVRG [paper]
    Fanhua Shang, Licheng Jiao, Kaiwen Zhou, James Cheng, Yan Ren, Yufei Jin.
    In Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML), 2018.

Preprints

 (*indicates equal contribution)

1. Positional Information Matters for Invariant In-Context Learning: A Case Study of Simple Function Classes [paper]
   Yongqiang Chen, Binghui Xie, Kaiwen Zhou, Bo Han, Yatao Bian, James Cheng.
   
2. An Adaptive Incremental Gradient Method With Support for Non-Euclidean Norms [paper]
   Binghui Xie*, Chenhan Jin*, Kaiwen Zhou, James Cheng, Wei Meng.
   
3. Local Reweighting for Adversarial Training [paper]
   Ruize Gao*, Feng Liu*, Kaiwen Zhou, Gang Niu, Bo Han, James Cheng.
   
4. Hyper-Sphere Quantization: Communication-Efficient SGD for Federated Learning [paper] [github]
   Xinyan Dai, Xiao Yan, Kaiwen Zhou, Han Yang, Kelvin Kai Wing Ng, James Cheng, Yu Fan.
   
5. Norm-Range Partition: A Universal Catalyst for LSH based Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) [paper]
   Xiao Yan, Xinyan Dai, Jie Liu, Kaiwen Zhou, James Cheng.
   

Theses

• Fast, Practical and Scalable First-Order Methods for Modern Machine Learning Problems [paper]
  The Chinese University of Hong Kong, PhD, 2022.
• Accelerating Finite-sum Convex Optimization and Highly-smooth Convex Optimization [paper]
  Outstanding Thesis Award of Faculty of Engineering (Sole Winner)
  The Chinese University of Hong Kong, MPhil, 2019.

Academic Service

• Conference refereeing: ICML 2021/22/23/24/25/26, NeurIPS 2021/22/23/24/25, AISTATS 2022/23/24/25/26, ICLR 2021/22/23/24/25/26, CVPR 2025/26, ICCV 2025, ECCV 2026, ACL 2026, ACMMM 2025.
• Journal refereeing: Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Optimization Methods and Software, Mathematical Programming Computation, Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

Last update: Mar 3, 2026.