Zihao Fu (付子豪)

I am a Research Assistant Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, working on Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). My research centers on the capabilities of LLMs: understanding how these capabilities emerge and are organized inside the model, enhancing them through efficient fine-tuning, and making them reliable and fair in real-world use. I am also an Affiliated Lecturer at the Language Technology Lab (LTL), University of Cambridge, and a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), University of Oxford.

Before joining CUHK, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the OII working with Prof. Chris Russell, Prof. Brent Mittelstadt, and Prof. Sandra Wachter, and before that a Research Associate at LTL, University of Cambridge, working with Prof. Nigel Collier. I received my Ph.D. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Prof. Wai Lam, and was a visiting student at the NLP Lab of Tsinghua University with Prof. Zhiyuan Liu. Prior to my Ph.D., I spent two years at Alibaba Cloud developing large-scale distributed machine learning algorithms for the PAI platform.

My work has been published at venues including NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI, and FAccT, and is supported by the NVIDIA Academic Grant and the AMD University Program AI Award. I also serve as an Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review (ARR).

Education & Research

	2024-2025	PostDoc	University of Oxford, Oxford Internet Institute, Advisor: Prof. Chris Russell
	2021-2024	PostDoc	University of Cambridge, Language Technology Lab, Advisor: Prof. Nigel Collier
	2017-2021	Ph.D.	The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, Advisor: Prof. Wai Lam
	2012-2015	M. E.	Beihang University, National Laboratory for Aeronautics and Astronautics, Advisor: Prof. Guanghong Gong
	2008-2012	B. E.	Beihang University, School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering

Work

2015-2017

Machine Learning Algorithm Engineer

IDST, Alibaba Cloud

Publications

1. ICASSP 2026
   Flexi-LoRA with Input-Adaptive Ranks: Efficient Finetuning for Speech and Reasoning Tasks

   Zongqian Li, Yixuan Su, Han Zhou, Zihao Fu, Nigel Collier

   The 2026 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026)
2. NeurIPS 2025
   FairImagen: Post-Processing for Bias Mitigation in Text-to-Image Models

   Zihao Fu, Ryan Brown, Shun Shao, Kai Rawal, Eoin Delaney, Chris Russell

   The 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
3. FAccT 2025
   Evaluating Model Explanations without Ground Truth

   Kaivalya Rawal, Zihao Fu, Eoin Delaney, and Chris Russell

   The 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2025)
4. NeurIPS 2024
   OxonFair: A Flexible Toolkit for Algorithmic Fairness

   Eoin Delaney, Zihao Fu, Sandra Wachter, Brent Mittelstadt, Chris Russell

   The 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)
5. AAAI 2024
   BAND: Biomedical Alert News Dataset

   Zihao Fu, Meiru Zhang, Zaiqiao Meng, Yannan Shen, David Buckeridge, Nigel Collier

   The 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024)
6. NeurIPS 2023
   Repetition In Repetition Out: Towards Understanding Neural Text Degeneration from the Data Perspective

   Huayang Li, Tian Lan, Zihao Fu, Deng Cai, Lemao Liu, Nigel Collier, Taro Watanabe, Yixuan Su

   The 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)
7. EMNLP 2023
   Biomedical Named Entity Recognition via Dictionary-based Synonym Generalization

   Zihao Fu, Yixuan Su, Zaiqiao Meng, Nigel Collier

   The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023)
8. Preprint
   Decoder-Only or Encoder-Decoder? Interpreting Language Model as a Regularized Encoder-Decoder

   Zihao Fu, Wai Lam, Qian Yu, Anthony Man-Cho So, Shengding Hu, Zhiyuan Liu, Nigel Collier

   Preprint
9. AAAI 2023
   On the Effectiveness of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

   Zihao Fu, Haoran Yang, Anthony Man-Cho So, Wai Lam, Lidong Bing, Nigel Collier

   The 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023)
10. Preprint
    A Stability Analysis of Fine-Tuning a Pre-Trained Model

    Zihao Fu, Anthony Man-Cho So, Nigel Collier

    Preprint
11. Bioinformatics 2022
    BioCaster in 2021: Automatic Disease Outbreaks Detection from Global News Media

    Zaiqiao Meng, Anya Okhmatovskaia, Maxime Polleri, Yannan Shen, Guido Powell, Zihao Fu, Iris Ganser, Meiru Zhang, Nicholas B. King, David Buckeridge, Nigel Collier

    Bioinformatics, 38(18), 2022
12. Ph.D. Thesis 2021
    Open Domain Text Generation

    Zihao Fu

    Ph.D. Thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
13. AAAI 2021
    A Theoretical Analysis of the Repetition Problem in Text Generation

    Zihao Fu, Wai Lam, Anthony Man-Cho So, Bei Shi

    The 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2021)
14. COLING 2020
    Dynamic Topic Tracker for KB-to-Text Generation

    Zihao Fu, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam, Shoaib Jameel

    The 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020)
15. AACL-IJCNLP 2020
    Unsupervised KB-to-Text Generation with Auxiliary Triple Extraction using Dual Learning

    Zihao Fu, Bei Shi, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

    The 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (AACL-IJCNLP 2020)
16. EMNLP 2020
    Partially-Aligned Data-to-Text Generation with Distant Supervision

    Zihao Fu, Bei Shi, Wai Lam, Lidong Bing, Zhiyuan Liu

    The 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2020)
17. AAAI 2020
    Open Domain Event Text Generation

    Zihao Fu, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

    The 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020)
18. NAACL-HLT 2019
    Fact Discovery from Knowledge Base via Facet Decomposition

    Zihao Fu, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Wai Lam

    The 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT 2019)
19. AAAI 2019
    Word Embedding as Maximum A Posteriori Estimation

    Shoaib Jameel, Zihao Fu, Bei Shi, Wai Lam, Steven Schockaert

    The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019)
20. ACL 2018
    Learning Domain-Sensitive and Sentiment-Aware Word Embeddings

    Bei Shi, Zihao Fu, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam

    The 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018)
21. ASC 2016
    Pilot Behavior Modeling Using LSTM Network: A Case Study

    Yanan Zhou, Zihao Fu, Guanghong Gong

    Asian Simulation Conference (ASC 2016)
22. PRICAI 2016
    Learning Sentimental Weights of Mixed-gram Terms for Classification and Visualization

    Tszhang Guo, Bowen Li, Zihao Fu, Tao Wan and Zengchang Qin

    Pacific Rim International Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2016)
23. JBUAA 2015
    Explicit moment integration algorithm and its application

    Zihao Fu, Guanghong Gong

    Journal of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (JBUAA 2015)
24. Master Thesis 2015
    Research on the Optimization Methods of the Blended-Wing-Body Aircraft

    Zihao Fu

    Master Thesis, Beihang University

Awards

• NVIDIA Academic Grant Award2026
• AMD University Program AI Award2026

Invited Talks

Introduction to Large Language Model: Technology, Challenges, and Prospects. CSSA Cambrige. 2023. [Slide]

Language Model for Science. Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery. 2023.

Service

Area Chair : ARR

Reviewer : AAAI, ACL, CIKM, COLING, EACL, EMNLP, ICASSP, ICDM, ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, NeurIPS, SIGIR, TACL, TKDE, TMLR

Teaching

2022-2023  Li18, Computational Linguistics, Guest Lecturer, University of Cambridge

2021-2022  FTEC 5510, Advanced Financial Infrastructure, Teaching Assistant, CUHK

2020-2021  FTEC 5530, Quantitative and Algorithmic Trading, Teaching Assistant, CUHK

2020-2021  ENGG 2780B, Statistics for Engineers, Teaching Assistant, CUHK

2020-2020  SEEM 4610, Supply Chain Management, Teaching Assistant, CUHK

2017-2020  SEEM 3460, Computer Processing System Concepts, Teaching Assistant, CUHK

2017-2019  SEEM 4540, Open Systems for E-Commerce, Teaching Assistant, CUHK

Course Notes

2019 IERG 6300 : Probability Theory. By Prof. Chandra Nair [My Notes]

2019 SEEM 5380 : Optimization Methods for High-Dimensional Statistics. By Prof. Anthony Man-Cho So [My Notes]

2018 IERG 5130 : Probabilistic Models and Inference Algorithms for Machine Learning. By Prof. Dahua Lin [My Notes]

2018 ENGG 5781 : Matrix Analysis and Computations. By Prof. Wing-Kin (Ken) Ma [My Notes]

2017 ENGG 5501 : Foundations of Optimization. By Prof. Anthony Man-Cho So [My Notes]

Projects

HAICO A platform for human-agent collaboration with inbox, issues, approvals, and live ops in one workspace. [GitHub]

BioCaster The BioCaster website at the University of Cambridge presents structured information about disease outbreaks, links to Internet news and related knowledge resources to people interested in public health and safety.

PaperArxiv  A paper management tool that helps to organize the mind. It focuses on taking notes, organizing, and archiving papers.

unillm An unified large language model interface for ChatGPT, LLaMA(2, 3), Mistral, Claude, RAG, CommandRPlus, and etc.

StreamTask  A lightweight python parallel framework for parallelizing the computationally intensive pipelines.

CAM-Tool  A Cloud Assignment Manager tool that helps manage tasks across different machines.

BitTrader  A real-time quantitative crypto coin trading, backtesting, and strategy developing plantform based on Backtrader.

CSTL A C++ STL containers wrapper for python to partially solve the Copy-on-Write issue.

ChatGPTHelper A plugin that automatically saves ChatGPT history and predefined prompts to local disk. This allows us to disable the official history feature, preventing our data from being used in training processes.

GitHub Contributions