Z Lab 
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