Handong Zhao

Handong is a research scientist at Adobe Research, San Jose, CA, since March 2018. He obtained the Ph.D. degree at Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA. His current research interest includes machine learning and its applications to multimedia content analysis and marketing analytics. Before this, he received both my master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Tianjin University, China.

His contact email is hazhao@adobe.com. For more information, please visit his personal page at https://hdzhao.github.io/

Publications

October 9, 2025 COLM 2025

DynaSaur: Large Language Agents Beyond Predefined Actions

Dang Nguyen, Viet Dac Lai, David Seunghyun Yoon, Ryan A. Rossi, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Puneet Mathur, Nedim Lipka, Yu Wang, Trung Bui, Franck Dernoncourt, Tianyi Zhou

June 15, 2025 CVPR 2025

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

June 1, 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

MAGNET: Augmenting Generative Decoders with Representation Learning and Infilling Capabilities

Savya Khosla, Aditi Tiwari, Kushal Kafle, Simon Jenni, Handong Zhao, John Collomosse, Jing Shi

April 28, 2025 The Web Conference

Interactive Visualization Recommendation with Hier-SUCB

Songwen Hu, Ryan A. Rossi, Tong Yu, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Shuai Li

March 11, 2025 ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data

Evaluation-Free Time-Series Forecasting Model Selection via Meta-Learning

mustafa abdallah, Ryan A. Rossi, Kanak Mahadik, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Saurabh Bagchi

January 28, 2025 EMNLP 2025

Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion

Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Ritwik Sinha, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang

January 23, 2025 arXiv

GUI-Bee: Align GUI Action Grounding to Novel Environments via Autonomous Exploration

Yue Fan, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Yu Shen, Xin Eric Wang, Gang Wu

November 12, 2024 EMNLP

Advancing Vision-Language Models with Adapter Ensemble Strategies

Yue Bai, Handong Zhao, Zhe Lin, Ajinkya Kale, Jiuxiang Gu, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Yun Fu

March 22, 2024 EACL 2024 Findings

Fine-tuning CLIP Text Encoders with Two-step Paraphrasing

Hyunjae Kim, David Seunghyun Yoon, Trung Bui, Handong Zhao, Quan Hung Tran, Franck Dernoncourt, Jaewoo Kang

March 17, 2024 The Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)

Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization via Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer in Prompt Tuning

Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Haoliang Wang, Junda Wu, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Kanak Mahadik, Ani Nenkova, Mark Riedl

December 15, 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)

Interpretable Unsupervised Log Anomaly Detection

Jaeho Bang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Tong Yu, Handong Zhao

December 11, 2023 IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM)

Content-aware Progressive Image Compression and Syncing

Junda Wu, Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Handong Zhao, Gang Wu, Stefano Petrangeli, Sungchul Kim, Vishy Swaminathan

December 10, 2023 NeurIPS

InfoPrompt: Information-Theoretic Soft Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Understanding

Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Rui Wang, Zhao Song, Ruiyi Zhang, Handong Zhao, Chaochao Lu, Shuai Li, Ricardo Henao

June 18, 2023 Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops

Improving Cross-Domain Detection with Self-Supervised Learning

Kai Li, Curtis Wigington, Chris Tensmeyer, Vlad Morariu, Handong Zhao, Varun Manjunatha, Nikolaos Barmpalios, Yun Fu

September 27, 2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

EI-CLIP: Entity-Aware Interventional Contrastive Learning for E-Commerce Cross-Modal Retrieval

Haoyu Ma, Handong Zhao, Zhe Lin, Ajinkya Kale, Zhangyang Wang, Tong Yu, Jiuxiang Gu, Sunav Choudhary, Xiaohui Xie

August 14, 2022 ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

External Knowledge Infusion for Tabular Pre-training Models with Dual-adapters

Can Qin, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Yun Fu

July 31, 2020 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

Structured Policy Iteration for Linear Quadratic Regulator

Youngsuk Park, Ryan A. Rossi, Zheng Wen, Gang Wu, Handong Zhao

June 22, 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Cross-Domain Document Object Detection: Benchmark Suite and Method

Kai Li, Curtis Wigington, Chris Tensmeyer, Handong Zhao, Nikolaos Barmpalios, Vlad Morariu, Varun Manjunatha, Tong Sun, Yun Fu

November 21, 2019 ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing

Linear Quadratic Regulator for Resource-Efficient Cloud Services

Youngsuk Park, Kanak Mahadik, Ryan Rossi, Gang Wu, Handong Zhao

October 27, 2019 International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

Unpaired Image Captioning via Scene Graph Alignments

Jiuxiang Gu, Shafiq Joty, Jianfei Cai, Handong Zhao, Xu Yang, Gang Wang

August 4, 2019 KDD - ACM SIGKDD CONFERENCE ON KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND DATA MINING

Log2Intent: Towards Interpretable User Modeling via Recurrent Semantics Memory Units

Zhiqiang Tao, Sheng Li, Zhaowen Wang, Chen Fang, Longqi Yang, Handong Zhao, Yun Fu

August 4, 2019 KDD

Towards Robust and Discriminative Sequential Data Learning: When and How to Perform Adversarial Training?

Xiaowei Jia, Sheng Li, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Vipin Kumar

June 16, 2019 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Scene Graph Generation with External Knowledge and Image Reconstruction

Jiuxiang Gu, Handong Zhao, Zhe Lin, Sheng Li, Jianfei Cai, Mingyang Ling

News

Teaching an AI Agent to Retouch Photos: RetouchIQ at CVPR 2026

RetouchIQ is an experimental AI editing agent that understands what you mean when you describe how a photo should look and feel, then translates that intent into precise adjustments in professional photo-editing software.

June 9, 2026