About Me

I'm Chi Zhang (张驰). I recently joined Peking University as a tenure-track assistant professor, after a year of research at ByteDance Seed and a few wonderful ones at Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI) as a full-time research scientist. Before that, I obtained my Ph.D. degree from Department of Computer Science, University of California - Los Angeles, advised by Professor Song-Chun Zhu.

My recent reseach interests include LLM efficient reasoning, agents and agency, abstract reasoning, active reasoning and applied research for challenging problems.

I used to work with Professor Dit-Yan Yeung at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Professor Deng Cai at my alma mater, Zhejiang University.

I serve as

Conference reviewer: CVPR (from 2019), ICCV (from 2019), ECCV (from 2020), NeurIPS (from 2020), ICLR (from 2020), ICML (from 2021), AAAI (from 2020)
Journal reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), Psychological Review

Publications

For the latest publications, please refer to my Google Scholar and the lab publication page.

Selected Publications

All Publications

Timing is Everything: Temporal Scaffolding of Semantic Surprise in Humor

Yuxi Ma^*, Yongqian Peng^*, Junchen Lyu, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

CogSci 2026 Marr Prize Winner

Paper

Multi-Level Narrative Evaluation Outperforms Lexical Features for Mental Health

Yuxi Ma^*, Jieming Cui^*, Muyang Li^*, Ye Zhao, Yu Li, Yixuan Wang, Chi Zhang, Yinyin Zang, Yixin Zhu

CogSci 2026

Paper

NarrativeLoom: Enhancing Creative Storytelling through Multi-Persona Collaborative Improvisation

Yuxi Ma, Yongqian Peng, Fengyuan Yang, Siyu Zha, Chi Zhang, Zixia Jia, Zilong Zheng, Yixin Zhu

CHI 2026

Paper / Video / Project

Learning physics-grounded 4D dynamics with neural gaussian force fields

Shiqian Li, Ruihong Shen, Junfeng Ni, Chang Pan, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

ICLR 2026

Paper / Code / Dataset / Video / Project

Neural Force Field: Few-shot Learning of Generalized Physical Reasoning

Shiqian Li, Ruihong Shen, Yaoyu Tao, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

ICLR 2026

Paper / Code / Dataset / Video / Project

Proposing and solving olympiad geometry with guided tree search

Chi Zhang, Jiajun Song, Siyu Li, Yitao Liang, Yuxi Ma, Wei Wang, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu

Nature Machine Intelligence, Jan Issue, 2026

Paper / Code / 新华社 / Xinhua News / 人民日报 / 人民网 / People's Daily / 科技日报

Heterogeneous Adversarial Play in Interactive Environments

Manjie Xu, Xinyi Yang, Jiayu Zhan, Wei Liang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

NeurIPS 2025

Paper / Code / Poster / Video / Project

Seed-Prover: Deep and Broad Reasoning for Automated Theorem Proving

ByteDance Seed AI4Math

Tech report, July, 2025

Paper / Code

Probing and inducing combinational creativity in vision-language models

Yongqian Peng, Yuxi Ma, Mengmeng Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Yizhou Wang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu, Zilong Zheng

CogSci 2025

Paper / Code / Dataset / Video / Project / 量子位

A simulation-heuristics dual-process model for intuitive physics

Shiqian Li, Yuxi Ma, Jiajun Yan, Bo Dai, Yujia Peng, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

CogSci 2025

Paper / Code / Video / Poster / Dataset

Human-level few-shot concept induction through minimax entropy learning

Chi Zhang, Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu

Science Advances, Vol 10, Issue 16, 2024

Paper / 人民日报 / 新华网 / 光明网 / 科技日报

I-PHYRE: Interactive Physical Reasoning

Shiqian Li, Kewen Wu, Chi Zhang,Yixin Zhu

ICLR 2024

Paper / Code / Video / Poster / Project / 北大AI院

Active Reasoning in an Open-World Environment

Manjie Xu, Guangyuan Jiang, Wei Liang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

NeurIPS 2023

Paper / Code / Supp / Poster / Project

Evaluating and Inducing Personality in Pre-trained Language Models

Guangyuan Jiang^*, Manjie Xu^*, Song-Chun Zhu, Wenjuan Han, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

NeurIPS 2023

Spotlight

Paper / Supp / Poster

Interactive Visual Reasoning under Uncertainty

Manjie Xu^*, Guangyuan Jiang^*, Wei Liang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks

Paper / Code / Supp / Poster / Project

X-VoE: Measuring eXplanatory Violation of Expectation in Physical Events

Bo Dai, Linge Wang, Baoxiong Jia, Zeyu Zhang, Song-Chun Zhu, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

ICCV 2023

Oral

Paper / Code / Supp / Poster / Dataset / Project

MEWL: Few-shot multimodal word learning with referential uncertainty

Guangyuan Jiang, Xanjie Xu, Shiji Xin, Wei Liang, Yujia Peng, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

ICML 2023

Paper / Code / Project

Brain in a vat: On missing pieces towards artificial general intelligence in large language models

Yuxi Ma, Chi Zhang, Song-Chun Zhu

Opinion, July, 2023

Paper

On the Learning Mechanisms in Physical Reasoning

Shiqian Li^*, Kewen Wu^*, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu

NeurIPS 2022

Spotlight

Paper / Poster / Code / Project / Media: Institute for AI, PKU

Learning Algebraic Representation for Systematic Generalization in Abstract Reasoning

Chi Zhang^*, Sirui Xie^*, Baoxiong Jia^*, Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu

ECCV 2022

Paper / Supp / Poster / Code / Dataset / Project / Media: Institute for AI, PKU / Media: PKU News / Media: PKU Weibo

DETR++: Taming Your Multi-Scale Detection Transformer

Chi Zhang, Lijuan Liu, Xiaoxue Zang, Frederick Liu, Hao Zhang, Xinying Song, Jindong Chen

T4V: Transformers for Vision @ CVPR 2022.

Paper / Poster

ACRE: Abstract Causal REasoning Beyond Covariation

Chi Zhang, Baoxiong Jia, Mark Edmonds, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu

CVPR 2021

Paper / Supp / Poster / Code / Dataset / Project

Abstract Spatial-Temporal Reasoning via Probabilistic Abduction and Execution

Chi Zhang^*, Baoxiong Jia^*, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu

CVPR 2021

Paper / Supp / Poster / Code / Project

Congestion-aware Multi-agent Trajectory Prediction for Collision Avoidance

Xu Xie, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu, Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu

ICRA 2021

Paper / Demo / Code / Project

Dark, Beyond Deep: A Paradigm Shift to Cognitive AI with Humanlike Common Sense

Yixin Zhu, Tao Gao, Lifeng Fan, Siyuan Huang, Mark Edmonds, Hangxin Liu, Feng Gao, Chi Zhang, Siyuan Qi, Ying Nian Wu, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Song-Chun Zhu

Engineering, Volume 6, Issue 3

Paper / Link / Media: Engineering

Machine Number Sense: A Dataset of Visual Arithmetic Problems for Abstract and Relational Reasoning

Wenhe Zhang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu

AAAI 2020

Oral

Paper / Poster / Code / Dataset (Google Drive) / Dataset (BaiduNetdisk) / Project

Learning Perceptual Inference by Contrasting

Chi Zhang^*, Baoxiong Jia^*, Feng Gao, Yixin Zhu, Hongjing Lu, Song-Chun Zhu

NeurIPS 2019

Spotlight (2.43% acceptance rate)

Paper / Slides / Poster / Code / Project

Learning Virtual Grasp with Failed Demonstrations via Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Xu Xie^*, Changyang Li^*, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu

IROS 2019

Paper / Demo / Code / Project

RAVEN: A Dataset for Relational and Analogical Visual rEasoNing

Chi Zhang^*, Feng Gao^*, Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu

CVPR 2019

Paper / Supp / Poster / Code / Dataset / Project / Media: Synced

MetaStyle: Three-Way Trade-Off Among Speed, Flexibility, and Quality in Neural Style Transfer

Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu

AAAI 2019

Paper / Supp / Slides / Poster / Demo / Code / Project

Mirroring without Overimitation: Learning Functionally Equivalent Manipulation Actions

Hangxin Liu, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu, Chenfanfu Jiang, Song-Chun Zhu

AAAI 2019

Paper /

Learning Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Control for Autonomous Target Following

Siyi Li, Tianbo Liu, Chi Zhang, Dit-Yan Yeung, Shaojie Shen

IJCAI 2018

Paper /

Question Retrieval for Community-based Question Answering via Heterogeneous Social Influential Network

Zheqian Chen, Chi Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Chengwei Yao, Deng Cai

Neurocomputing, Volume 285

Paper /

A Method of Exact 3D Modeling Based on Natural Gestures via Data Gloves (in Chinese)

Xiangdong Li, Sihong Lv, Yikun Wang, Xiaowo Sun, Chi Zhang

Patent publication number: CN104778746 B

Link