Zhijian Liu
I am an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego, where I direct Z Lab. I am also a Research Scientist at NVIDIA. I received my PhD from MIT, advised by Song Han.
My research focuses on making AI smaller, faster, and more efficient through full-stack innovations across algorithm, system, and application layers.
Openings
I am recruiting PhD students (HDSI/CSE) to work on efficient AI. Please apply through the program and mention my name in your application. I am also always looking for research interns. If you are interested, please fill out this form.
I commit one hour every week to mentoring students from underrepresented groups. Sign up here.
News
- 5 papers accepted to ICLR 2026, including ParoQuant.
- Selected as a Rising Star in Data Science by UChicago and UCSD.
- Selected as a Rising Star in ML and Systems by MLCommons.
- Awarded the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.
Selected Publications
ParoQuant: Pairwise Rotation Quantization for Efficient Reasoning LLM Inference Yesheng Liang , Haisheng Chen , Zihan Zhang , Song Han , Zhijian Liu
DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding Jian Chen , Yesheng Liang , Zhijian Liu
VLASH: Real-Time VLAs via Future-State-Aware Asynchronous Inference Jiaming Tang* , Yufei Sun* , Yilong Zhao , Shang Yang , Yujun Lin , Zhuoyang Zhang , James Hou , Yao Lu , Zhijian Liu , Song Han
SparseVILA: Decoupling Visual Sparsity for Efficient VLM Inference Samir Khaki , Junxian Guo , Jiaming Tang , Shang Yang , Yukang Chen , Konstantinos N. Plataniotis , Yao Lu , Song Han , Zhijian Liu
ICCV 2025
Paper
NVILA: Efficient Frontier Visual Language Models Zhijian Liu* , Ligeng Zhu* , Baifeng Shi , Zhuoyang Zhang , Yuming Lou , Shang Yang , Haocheng Xi , Shiyi Cao , Yuxian Gu , Dacheng Li , Xiuyu Li , Yunhao Fang , Yukang Chen , Cheng-Yu Hsieh , De-An Huang , An-Chieh Cheng , Vishwesh Nath , Jinyi Hu , Sifei Liu , Ranjay Krishna , Daguang Xu , Xiaolong Wang , Pavlo Molchanov , Jan Kautz , Hongxu Yin† , Song Han† , Yao Lu†
© 2026 Zhijian Liu