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Jiazhou Zhou

PhD Student
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA)
jiazhou.garland@gmail.com

About Me

Hi! I am Jiazhou Zhou (周佳舟), a PhD student (2024.09–) at AI Thrust, Information Hub of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Lei Zhang and Prof. Yingcong Chen. I am also a research intern at International Digital Economy Academy (IDEA).

Research Interests

Dedicated to building Next-Generation Self-Evolving Embodied Cognitive Systems grounded in physical reality. My research establishes a closed loop of Physical Interaction — World Modeling — Policy Self-Evolution to transcend static pre-training paradigms, focusing on three core thrusts:

Embodied Decision-Making & Policy Self-Evolution

Investigating active intervention and long-horizon multi-turn planning for embodied agents. Specifically, addressing long-term temporal credit assignment under sparse rewards via on-policy self-distillation and multimodal agentic reinforcement learning, enabling continuous self-improvement without dense human supervision.

Multimodal World Models & Embodied Counterfactual Reasoning

Developing physics-grounded world models that serve as internal neural physics engines for embodied agents. Leveraging active interrogation and self-reflection to facilitate latent counterfactual imagination, spatiotemporal causal prediction, and test-time planning scaling to provide predictive priors for complex decision-making.

Embodied Full-Modal Perception Foundations

Designing modality-agnostic representations across vision, touch, 3D geometric priors, and neuromorphic event streams in dynamic, unstructured physical environments, establishing a low-latency, robust sensory foundation for embodied physical grounding.

Publications (Selected)

Selected publications (12 papers, 10 published/accepted). Please refer to my Google Scholar for a full paper list.

    Part I: Multimodal Agents, Agentic RL & On-Policy Distillation
  1. PIVOT Preprint
    PIVOT: Pivot-Aware On Policy Self Distillation for Multi-Turn VLM Agents
    Jiazhou Zhou, Hu Zhou, Yucheng Chen, Jinyuan Qu, Ying-Cong Chen, Lei Zhang
    Under review, 2026.
    Page PDF
    VLM Agents Agentic RL On-Policy Distillation
    2. Part II: Multimodal Reasoning & Latent Space Reasoning
  2. V-Reflection Preprint
    V-Reflection: Transforming MLLMs from Passive Observers to Active Interrogators
    Jiazhou Zhou, Yucheng Chen, Haoran Li, Qing Jiang, Hu Zhou, Ying-Cong Chen, Lei Zhang
    Under review, 2026.
    Homepage PDF Code Hugging Face
    MLLM Latent Reasoning Visual Grounding
  3. UR2-MLLM EMNLP 2026
    UR2-MLLM: Uncertainty-aware Revisit Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models for Radiology Report Generation
    Yucheng Chen, Yang Yu, Jiazhou Zhou, Yufei Shi, Yongying Lan, Yichi Zhang, Liyi Li, Si Yong Yeo
    The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP, 2026.
    PDF
    MLLM Uncertainty Medical Imaging
  4. ExACT CVPR 2024 Highlight
    ExACT: Language-guided Conceptual Reasoning and Uncertainty Estimation for Event-based Action Recognition and More
    Jiazhou Zhou, Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lin Wang
    The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR (CCF-A), 2024. Highlight (2.8%)
    PDF Page
    Uncertainty Conceptual Reasoning Event Camera
    5. Part III: Multimodal Alignment, Perception & Event Vision
  5. T-Rex-Omni AAAI 2025
    T-Rex-Omni: Integrating Negative Visual Prompt in Generic Object Detection
    Jiazhou Zhou, Qing Jiang, Kanghao Chen, Lutao Jiang, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Ying-Cong Chen, Lei Zhang
    The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI (CCF-A), 2025.
    PDF T-Rex Series Product Page
    Open world Object Detection Negative Visual Prompt
  6. PASS NeurIPS 2025
    PASS: Path-selective State Space Model for Event-based Recognition
    Jiazhou Zhou, Kanghao Chen, Lei Zhang, Lin Wang
    The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS (CCF-A), 2025.
    Page PDF Code
    Event Camera State Space Model Recognition
  7. UniBind CVPR 2024
    UniBind: LLM-Augmented Unified and Balanced Representation Space to Bind Them All
    Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Xu Zheng, Jiazhou Zhou, Lin Wang
    The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (CCF-A), 2024.
    Page PDF Code
    Multimodal Alignment Representation Learning
  8. LaSe-E2V NeurIPS 2024
    LaSe-E2V: Towards Language-guided Semantic-Aware Event-to-Video Reconstruction
    Kanghao Chen, Haoran Li, Jiazhou Zhou, Zeyu Wang, Lin Wang
    The Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS (CCF-A), 2024.
    PDF Page
    Event-to-Video Language-guided
  9. EventBind ECCV 2024
    EventBind: Learning a Unified Representation to Bind Them All for Event-based Open-world Understanding
    Jiazhou Zhou, Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lin Wang
    European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV (CCF-B), 2024.
    Page PDF Code
    Event Camera Open-world CLIP
  10. MAGIC ECCV 2024
    Centering the Value of Every Modality: Towards Efficient and Resilient Modality-agnostic Semantic Segmentation
    Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Jiazhou Zhou, Lin Wang
    European Conference on Computer Vision, ECCV (CCF-B), 2024.
    PDF Page
    Semantic Segmentation Multimodal

Professional & Academic Experience

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