Lizhu Zhang

AI Researcher, husband, and dad of three. I head to the gym, hike, and play tennis to keep a fresh mind.

I am an AI Research Scientist Director at Meta. Before Meta, I worked on recommender systems and distributed systems at Twitter/X, Uber, Google, and VMware. My research spans reinforcement learning, causal inference, auto-research, and model paradigm innovation across RecSys and LLMs.

I feel fortunate to work alongside some of the brightest minds in the field, exploring the frontiers of AI together.

I received my bachelor’s degree in Physics and my master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, where I was advised by Dr. Yu Zheng.

news

May 15, 2026	Two papers accepted to ACL 2026 — Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (Main Conference) and TARo: Token-level Adaptive Routing for LLM Test-time Alignment (Findings).
May 01, 2026	Paper Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute accepted to ICML 2026.
Mar 15, 2026	Paper StreamMem: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Memory for Streaming Video Understanding accepted to a CVPR 2026 Workshop (VidLLMs).

selected publications

* indicates corresponding / joint last authorship. | full list →

2026

ICML

Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute

Nuoya Xiong, Yuhang Zhou, Hanqing Zeng, Zhaorun Chen, Furong Huang, Shuchao Bi, Zhuokai Zhao, and Lizhu Zhang^*

In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026

Conference Accepted

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{xiong2026fusionroute,
  title = {Token-Level LLM Collaboration via FusionRoute},
  author = {Xiong, Nuoya and Zhou, Yuhang and Zeng, Hanqing and Chen, Zhaorun and Huang, Furong and Bi, Shuchao and Zhao, Zhuokai and Zhang, Lizhu},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Conference Accepted},
}

ACL

Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding

Yuhang Zhou, Mingrui Zhang, Ke Li, Mingyi Wang, Qiao Liu, Qifei Wang, Jiayi Liu, Fei Liu, Serena Li, Weiwei Li, Mingze Gao, Abhishek Kumar, Xiangjun Fan, Zhuokai Zhao, and Lizhu Zhang^*

In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026

Main Conference

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{zhou2026mixtureofminds,
  title = {Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding},
  author = {Zhou, Yuhang and Zhang, Mingrui and Li, Ke and Wang, Mingyi and Liu, Qiao and Wang, Qifei and Liu, Jiayi and Liu, Fei and Li, Serena and Li, Weiwei and Gao, Mingze and Kumar, Abhishek and Fan, Xiangjun and Zhao, Zhuokai and Zhang, Lizhu},
  booktitle = {Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Main Conference},
}

ACL

TARo: Token-level Adaptive Routing for LLM Test-time Alignment

Arushi Rai, Qiang Zhang, Hanqing Zeng, Yunkai Zhang, Dipesh Tamboli, Xiangjun Fan, Zhuokai Zhao, and Lizhu Zhang^*

In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026

Findings

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{rai2026taro,
  title = {TARo: Token-level Adaptive Routing for LLM Test-time Alignment},
  author = {Rai, Arushi and Zhang, Qiang and Zeng, Hanqing and Zhang, Yunkai and Tamboli, Dipesh and Fan, Xiangjun and Zhao, Zhuokai and Zhang, Lizhu},
  booktitle = {Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Findings},
}

ICML

StreamMem: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Memory for Streaming Video Understanding

Yanlai Yang, Zhuokai Zhao, Satya Narayan Shukla, Aashu Singh, Shlok Kumar Mishra, Lizhu Zhang^*, and Mengye Ren

In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026

Conference Submission

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{yang2026streammem,
  title = {StreamMem: Query-Agnostic KV Cache Memory for Streaming Video Understanding},
  author = {Yang, Yanlai and Zhao, Zhuokai and Shukla, Satya Narayan and Singh, Aashu and Mishra, Shlok Kumar and Zhang, Lizhu and Ren, Mengye},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year = {2026},
  note = {Conference Submission},
}

2025

NeurIPS

Thought Communication in Multiagent Collaboration

Yujia Zheng, Zhuokai Zhao, Zijian Li, Yaqi Xie, Mingze Gao, Lizhu Zhang^*, and Kun Zhang

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

Spotlight

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{zheng2025thought,
  title = {Thought Communication in Multiagent Collaboration},
  author = {Zheng, Yujia and Zhao, Zhuokai and Li, Zijian and Xie, Yaqi and Gao, Mingze and Zhang, Lizhu and Zhang, Kun},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year = {2025},
  note = {Spotlight},
}

NeurIPS

S’MoRE: Structural Mixture of Residual Experts for Parameter-Efficient LLM Fine-tuning

Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia, Zhuokai Zhao, Lizhu Zhang, Xiangjun Fan, and Benyu Zhang

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

Poster

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{zeng2025smore,
  title = {S'MoRE: Structural Mixture of Residual Experts for Parameter-Efficient LLM Fine-tuning},
  author = {Zeng, Hanqing and Xia, Yinglong and Zhao, Zhuokai and Zhang, Lizhu and Fan, Xiangjun and Zhang, Benyu},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)},
  year = {2025},
  note = {Poster},
}

2011

TWEB

Recommending friends and locations based on individual location history

Yu Zheng, Lizhu Zhang, Zhengxin Ma, Xing Xie, and Wei-Ying Ma

ACM Transactions on the Web, 2011

Bib

@article{zheng2011recommending,
  title = {Recommending friends and locations based on individual location history},
  author = {Zheng, Yu and Zhang, Lizhu and Ma, Zhengxin and Xie, Xing and Ma, Wei-Ying},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on the Web},
  year = {2011},
}

2009

WWW

Mining interesting locations and travel sequences from GPS trajectories

Yu Zheng, Lizhu Zhang, Xing Xie, and Wei-Ying Ma

In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2009

Bib

@inproceedings{zheng2009mininglocations,
  title = {Mining interesting locations and travel sequences from GPS trajectories},
  author = {Zheng, Yu and Zhang, Lizhu and Xie, Xing and Ma, Wei-Ying},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW)},
  year = {2009},
}

GIS

Mining correlation between locations using human location history

Yu Zheng, Lizhu Zhang, Xing Xie, and Wei-Ying Ma

In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 2009

Bib

@inproceedings{zheng2009correlation,
  title = {Mining correlation between locations using human location history},
  author = {Zheng, Yu and Zhang, Lizhu and Xie, Xing and Ma, Wei-Ying},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (GIS)},
  year = {2009},
}