About Me

My name is Handong Zhao. I am a Senior Research Scientist in Vision Language Lab (VLL) at Adobe Research in San Jose, CA. My research focuses on vision-language foundation models, multimodal agents, and post-training, with applications in visual understanding, generation, and tool-using creative AI systems. At Adobe, I have led and co-led research efforts on multimodal image editing agents, large-scale vision-language foundation models, and image/video generation post-training, with technologies transferred across Adobe Creative Cloud products.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University , Boston, MA. I was also a recipient of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) award as an Entrepreneurial Lead.

Recent News

  • [09/26] One paper accepted to NeurIPS 2026: LogicDirector: Enforcing Temporal Composition in Text-to-Video Generation . LogicDirector uses logic-guided test-time latent search to improve temporal composition in video generation.
  • [07/26] One paper accepted to COLM 2026: SpyRL: Task Transformation for Non-Verifiable Open-Ended Tasks . SpyRL introduces an alternative approach to solving non-verifiable tasks , distinct from our previous CVPR 2026 work RetouchIQ .
  • [05/26] Two ICML-26 papers accepted on post-training techniques, covering VividCam for Video Generation and Efficient Multimodal RL .
  • [02/26] One CVPR-26 paper accepted on RetouchIQ: MLLM Image Editing Agent via Tool-use .
  • [01/26] Two ICLR-2026 papers accepted on VLM for Controllable Retrieval and Visual Reasoning .
  • [2026] Serving as ICLR-26/ICML-26/ACL ARR-26 Area Chair.
  • [09/25] One NeurIPS-25 accepted on MLLM on Video Temporal Reasoning .
  • [08/25] Two EMNLP papers accepted on GUI-Agent and TableQA.
  • [06/25] Two VLM papers accepted. CVPR-25 on PhotoEye: image quality/aesthetic understanding and ICCV-25 on VSP: assessing spatial planning capability .
  • [05/25] One LLM paper accepted by ACL-25 on Augmenting Generative Decoders with Representation Learning and Infilling Capabilities.

  • More ...

    • [10/24] Appointed as ICLR-25 Area Chair.
    • [09/24] One NeurIPS-24 and two EMNLP-24 papers accepted on VL representation learning and MLLM .
    • [07/24] One ECCV-2024 accepted on Training-free Domain Generalization .
    • [05/24] One TMLR journal accepted on Continual Graph Learning .
    • [01/24] One ICLR-2024 accepted on Self-supervised Learning for Entity Segmentation .
    • [09/23] One NeurIPS-2023 paper accepted on InfoPrompt for NLU .
    • [07/23] One ICCV-2023 paper accepted on Spatial-Temporal Attention Controlled Diffusion Model .
    • [05/23] One ACL-2023 finding paper accepted on " Domain Adaptation for Named Entity Recognition ".
    • [03/23] One CVPR-2023 paper accepted on " Uncovering Disentaglement Capability of Diffusion Models ".
    • [01/23] Appointed as Associate Editor for for IEEE TCSVT.
    • [01/23] One ICLR-2023 paper accepted on " Continual Federated Learning ".
    • [11/22] One AAAI-2023 paper accepted on " Compositional Image Retrieval ".
    • [10/22] Two EMNLP-2022 papers accepted on " Multilingual Rep. Learning ".
    • [08/22] Four CIKM-2022 papers accepted.
    • [06/22] One RecSys-2022 on " Conversational Bundle Rec " accepted as oral.
    • [06/22] Gave a talk on Federated Knowledge Composition in CVPR FedVision Workshop. [video recording]
    • [05/22] One KDD-2022 on " KG Infusion for Tabular Pre-training Models " accepted.
    • [04/22] One SIGIR-2022 on " Cross-domain Interaction Recommendation " accepted.
    • [03/22] One CVPR-2022 on " Fashion CLIP " and one L4DC-2022 on " Neural Spatiotemporal Point Process " accepted.
    • [02/22] Two ACL-2022 papers accepted on " Few-Shot Class-Incremental NER " and " Learning Adaptive Axis Attentions in Fine-tuning (Finding paper) ".
    • [01/22] One paper " Neural Contextual Bandits with Deep Representation and Shallow Exploration " accepted by ICLR-2022 .
    • [01/22] One paper on " Federated Learning for Multilingual NLU " accepted by WWW-2022 .
    • [12/21] One paper on " Continual Federated Learning " accepted by ICLR-2023 .
    • [12/21] One paper on " Cross-Domain Clustering " accepted by AAAI-2022 student abstract and poster program.
    • [10/21] Two papers on " Continual NER " and " User-in-the-loop NER " accepted by NeurIPS ENLSP Workshop .
    • [09/21] Two papers on " KD-based Graph Similarity Computation " and " Document Representation Learning " accepted by NeurIPS-2021 .
    • [08/21] One short paper on " Sequential Recommender System " accepted by CIKM-2021 .
    • [07/21] Two papers on " Source-Free DA " and " Semi-Supervised DA " accepted by ICCV-2021 .
    • [05/21] One paper on " Explainable Column Annotation " accepted by KDD-2021 .
    • [05/21] One paper on " KG-based Commonsense Reasoning " accepted by Findings of ACL-2021 .
    • [04/21] I'm co-organizing The 3rd Workshop on Continual and Multimodal Learning for Internet of Things (CML-IOT) , at IJCAI-2021. The qualified papers are planned to invited as submissions to a journal special issue.
    • [03/21] One CVPR-2021 on " Document Representation Learning " and one NAACL-2021 on " KG Enrichment " got accepted.
    • [01/21] One ICLR-2021 on " Learning to Deceive KG " accepted.
    • [12/20] One NeurIPS-KR2ML workshop paper on " KG-based Commonsense Reasoning " accepted.
    • [11/20] One paper on " Learnable Subspace Clustering " accepted by TNNLS. [arXiv] .
    • [09/20] One NeurIPS-2020 on " Self-Supervised Relationship Probing " accepted.
    • [07/20] One ECCV-2020 on " Open Domain Image Manipulation " and one CIKM-2020 on " KG Reasoning for Recommendation " accepted.
    • [06/20] One paper on " Linear Quadratic Regulator " accepted by ICML-2020 .
    • [05/20] One paper on " Personalized Image Retrieval " accepted by KDD-2020 .
    • [04/20] One survey paper on " Representation Learning for User Modeling " was accepted by IJCAI-2020 .
    • [03/20] Our IJCAI-2020 tutorial " Robust Multi-view Visual Learning: A Knowledge Flow Perspective " was accepted (with prof. Zhengming Ding and prof. Ming Shao).
    • [02/20] One paper on " Cross-domain Document Object Detection " was accepted by CVPR-2020 .
    • [11/19] One SoCC-2019 poster and one BigData-2019 paper accepted.
    • [09/19] I gave a talk on " Multi-modal Representation Learning ", invited by Prof. Hongfu Liu at Brandeis.
    • [07/19] One ICCV-2019 paper got accepted. Congratulations to Jiuxiang.
    • [04/19] Two KDD-2019 papers accepted on the topics of " Sequential Adversarial Learning " and " Interpretable User Modeling ".
    • [02/19] My FIRST summer intern Jiuxiang's work on " Scene Graph Generation " got accepted by CVPR-2019 .
    • [02/19] Co-host (with Myra and Subrata) session " AI For System " won Top Ten Session in Adobe-TechSummit-2019. Got my first trophy at Adobe.
    • [12/18] Accepted the invitation to serve as PC member for IJCAI-2019 .
    • [11/18] Will host a mini-summit, " Analyze, Predict, and Visualize: when RNNs meet Adobe ", at Adobe-TechSummit-2019 with Sungchul Kim.
    • [10/18] I have one paper accepted by WSDM-2019 (Acceptance Rate: 16.4%).
    • [10/18] AAAI-2019 Tutorial " Deep Multi-view Data Analytics " was accepted (with Allan Ding and Hongfu Liu).
    • [05/18] Accepted the invitations to serve as PC for NIPS-2018 and SPC for AAAI-2019 .
    • [03/18] One book proposal (with Allan and Prof. Raymond Fu) is accepted by Springer.
    • [03/18] I accepted the invitation to serve as a member of the Program Committee for CVPR-2018 workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gestures (AMFG).
    • [02/18] I accepted the invitation to serve as a member of the Program Committee for ICMLA-2018.
    • [01/18] I have one paper accepted by WACV-2018 .

    • Selected Publications

    For the complete list of publications, please refer to my Google Scholar page.

    * Project lead or primary advisor · † Equal advisor

    • RetouchIQ image retouching examples
      RetouchIQ: MLLM Agents for Instruction-Based Image Retouching with Generalist Reward
      Qiucheng Wu, Jing Shi, Simon Jenni, Kushal Kafle, Tianyu Wang, Shiyu Chang, Handong Zhao *
      CVPR 2026
      Paper Project Lead
    • SpyRL framework overview
      From RLVR to RLSVR: Task Transformation Induces Self-Verifiable Rewards for Open-Ended LLM Self-Improvement
      Qinsi Wang, Jing Shi, Huazheng Wang, Kun Wan, Yiran Wu, Bo Liu, Qingyun Wu, Hai Helen Li, Yiran Chen, Handong Zhao † , Wentian Zhao †
      COLM 2026
      Paper Code Co-Lead
    • VividCam: Learning Unconventional Camera Motions from Virtual Synthetic Videos
      Qiucheng Wu, Handong Zhao * , Zhixin Shu, Jing Shi, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang
      ICML 2026
      Paper Project Page Project Lead
    • VSP benchmark: maze navigation, blocks world, collision and map planning
      VSP: Diagnosing the Dual Challenges of Perception and Reasoning in Spatial Planning Tasks for MLLMs
      Qiucheng Wu, Handong Zhao † , Michael Saxon, Trung Bui, William Yang Wang, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang †
      ICCV 2025 Co-Lead
      Paper Code
    • PhotoEye benchmark overview
      The Photographer’s Eye: Teaching Multimodal Large Language Models to See, and Critique Like Photographers
      Daiqing Qi, Handong Zhao * , Jing Shi, Simon Jenni, Yifei Fan, Franck Dernoncourt, Scott Cohen, Sheng Li
      CVPR 2025
      Paper Code Project Lead

    Selected Talk

    CVPR FedVision keynote: Federated Knowledge Composition — Handong Zhao

    Keynote on CVPR FedVision Workshop
    Federated Knowledge Composition
    Handong Zhao
    FedVision: International Workshop on Federated Learning for Computer Vision
    New Orleans, Louisiana. [ Recording ]

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