Huan Wang

My name is Huan Wang (Chinese: 王欢). I work for (myself at) Westlake University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, leading the ENCODE Lab.

I earned my Ph.D. degree (2024) at Northeastern University (Boston, USA), advised by Prof. Yun (Raymond) Fu. Before that, I obtained my M.S. and B.E. degrees from Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China), advised by Prof. Haoji Hu. I also visited VLLab at UC Merced, luckily working with Prof. Ming-Hsuan Yang. I was fortunate to intern at Google/Snap/MERL/Alibaba, working with many fantastic industrial researchers. I serve as an Area Chair for AAAI/ICLR/CVPR/NeurIPS 2026.

My research focuses on Efficient AI and AI Evaluation, exploring the nature of Intelligence. Here is my research statement. I also spent some time on a few philosophical problems about AI (or not), where I have been inspired by Kant, Duchamp, etc.

Google Scholar / OpenReview / GitHub / LinkedIn / X / Rednote (小红书)

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Openings / Collaborations
  • 🌟 Hiring PhD students, research assistants, and visiting students.
  • 🔥 I am actively looking for PhD students (Fall 2027) and visiting students (Summer 2026, targetting ICLR 2027 or CVPR 2027) for research-oriented projects.
  • 😊 How to apply? Please check this admission.pdf (✨ this document is maintained up to date and contains ALL guidelines you need to apply). Thanks!
Recent News
Filter news
  • 2026/06 [CVPR'26] ENCODE Lab is attending CVPR 2026 in Denver. See you in altitude!
  • 2026/05 [Recent works] Can LLMs write efficient kernels for mobile devices? Check it in our MobileKernelBench!
  • 2026/05 [ICML'26] 4 papers accepted by ICML 2026! Congrats to my students and collaborators! See you in Seoul! 🎉
  • 2026/02 [CVPR'26] 6 papers accepted by CVPR 2026! Congrats to my students and collaborators! 🎉 - LinkedIn post
  • 2026/01 [ICLR'26] 4 papers accepted by ICLR 2026! Congrats to my students and collaborators! 🎉 - LinkedIn post
  • 2026/01 [TMLR'26, Survey] Our systematic review of the long-context MLLM token compression methods is accepted by TMLR! [arxiv] [paper-repo]
  • 2026/01 [CPAL'26] Two papers on efficient LLMs/MLLMs via sparsity and low-rank decomposition are accepted by CPAL'26. Congrats to Mingluo (Fall'26 incoming PhD student) and Haolei (visiting student)! Codes will be released soon.
  • 2025/11 [Funds] Received a research fund from CAAI-Ant Group (CAAI-蚂蚁科研基金). Thank you CAAI and Ant Group!
  • 2025/09 [Funds] Received a research fund from a Hangzhou Municipal Talent Program (杭州市青年人才项目). Thanks!
  • 2025/09 [NeurIPS'25] 4 papers accepted by NeurIPS 2025 in the field of efficient and reliable AI. Congrats to my students and collaborators from CWRU! 🎉 The three papers from our group:
    • HoliTom: As a top-performing video LLM token compression method, HoliTom can maintain 99.1% performance while reducing the FLOPs to only 6.9%. And, it's training-free! [arxiv] [code] [webpage]
    • Poison as Cure: Adversarial visual noise is always malicious to our models like "poison"? No, we find it can also be a cure to mitigate the hallucination problem of VLMs. [arxiv] [code] [webpage]
    • FreqExit: FreqExit is a dynamic inference framework for visual autoregressive (VAR) models via early exit equiped with a novel proposed frequency-aware guidance. [openreview] [code] [webpage]
  • 2025/09 [Services] I will serve as an Area Chair for ICLR 2026 and CVPR 2026.
  • 2025/07 [Preprint] We are excited to present the first systematic review of multimodal long-context token compression methods. [arxiv] [code]
  • 2025/07 [MM'25] A paper about efficient video diffusion model via network pruning is accepted by MM'25. Congrats again to Yiming! Code will be released soon.
  • 2025/06 [ICCV'25] A paper about efficient robot manipulation is accepted by ICCV'25. Congrats to Yiming! Code will be released soon.
  • 2025/06 [Award-to-Students] 🎉Congrats to my PhD student Keda Tao on receiving the "2025 Westlake University Xinrui Award (西湖大学博士研究生新锐奖)" (only 2 recipients in AI among all the 2025 Fall PhD students in School of Engineering).
  • 2025/06 [Services] I will serve as an Area Chair for AAAI 2026.
  • 2025/02 [CVPR'25] DyCoke is accepted by CVPR'25! Congrats to my PhD student Keda! DyCoke is a training-free, plug-and-play token compression method for fast video LLMs: 1.5x wall-clock inference speedup and 1.4x memory reduction with no performance drop. [arxiv][code]
  • 2025/02 [Preprint] Can diffusion models blend visual concepts that are semantically very unsimilar (e.g., an orange and a teddy bear)? Yes, we introduce FreeBlend, a new method to blend arbitrary concepts. [arxiv] [code] [webpage]
  • 2025/01 [ICLR'25] One paper about distilling large foundation models with low cost "Compressing Vision Foundation Models at ImageNet-level Costs" is accepted by ICLR'25. Thanks to the lead author Yitian!
  • 2024/12 [Preprint] We present empirical evidence to show that oracle pruning, the "ground-truth" pruning paradigm that has been followed for around 35 years in the pruning community, does not hold in practice. [arxiv][webpage]
  • 2024/09 [NeurIPS'24] We introduce a training framework Scala to learn slimmable ViTs. Using Scala, a ViT model is trained once but can inference at different widths, up to the need of devices with different resources. The project is led by Yitian. Congrats!
  • 2024/07 [MM'24] We present the first real-time on-device video SCI (Snapshot Compressive Imaging) framework via dedicated network design and a distillation-based training strategy. Congrats to Miao!
  • 2024/07 [ECCV'24] One paper about efficient video SCI (Snapshot Compressive Imaging) via network quantization is accepted by ECCV'24 as an oral. Congrats to Miao! [code]
  • 2024/06 [New Start] Join the beautiful Westlake University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.
  • 2024/04 [Graduation] 🎈PhD student→PhD. So many thanks to my Ph.D. committee (Prof. Yun Raymond Fu, Prof. Octavia Camps, Prof. Zhiqiang Tao) and co-authors!
Contact
  • Work: wanghuan [at] westlake.edu.cn
  • Review: huan.wang.cool [at] gmail.com

(This webpage template is stolen from Jon Barron)