Handong Zhao

Research Scientist

San Jose

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

The Photographer’s Eye: Teaching Multimodal Large Language Models to See, and Critique Like Photographers

Qi, Daiqing., Zhao, Handong., Shi, Jing., Jenni, Simon., Fan, Yifei., Dernoncourt, Franck., Cohen, Scott., Li, Sheng. (Jun. 15, 2025)

CVPR 2025

Interactive Visualization Recommendation with Hier-SUCB

Hu, Songwen., Rossi, Ryan., Yu, Tong., Wu, Junda., Zhao, Handong., Kim, Sungchul., Li, Shuai. (Apr. 28, 2025)

The Web Conference

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

abdallah, mustafa., Rossi, Ryan., Mahadik, Kanak., Kim, Sungchul., Zhao, Handong., Bagchi, Saurabh. (Mar. 11, 2025)

ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data

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

Liu, Yujian., Ji, Jiabao., Yu, Tong., Rossi, Ryan., Kim, Sungchul., Zhao, Handong., Sinha, Ritwik., Zhang, Yang., Chang, Shiyu. (Jan. 28, 2025)

Arxiv

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

Fan, Yue., Zhao, Handong., Zhang, Ruiyi., Shen, Yu., Wang, Xin., Wu, Gang. (Jan. 23, 2025)

arXiv

Advancing Vision-Language Models with Adapter Ensemble Strategies

Bai, Yue., Zhao, Handong., Lin, Zhe., Kale, Ajinkya., Gu, Jiuxiang., Yu, Tong., Kim, Sungchul., Fu, Yun. (Nov. 12, 2024)

EMNLP

Fine-tuning CLIP Text Encoders with Two-step Paraphrasing

Kim, Hyunjae., Yoon, David., Bui, Trung., Zhao, Handong., Tran, Quan., Dernoncourt, Franck., Kang, Jaewoo. (Mar. 22, 2024)

EACL 2024 Findings

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

Xie, Kaige., Yu, Tong., Wang, Haoliang., Wu, Junda., Zhao, Handong., Zhang, Ruiyi., Mahadik, Kanak., Nenkova, Ani., Riedl, Mark. (Mar. 17, 2024)

The Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)

Interpretable Unsupervised Log Anomaly Detection

Bang, Jaeho., Kim, Sungchul., Rossi, Ryan., Yu, Tong., Zhao, Handong. (Dec. 15, 2023)

IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)

Content-aware Progressive Image Compression and Syncing

Wu, Junda., Wang, Haoliang., Yu, Tong., Zhao, Handong., Wu, Gang., Petrangeli, Stefano., Kim, Sungchul., Swaminathan, Vishy. (Dec. 11, 2023)

IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM)

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

Wu, Junda., Yu, Tong., Wang, Rui., Song, Zhao., Zhang, Ruiyi., Zhao, Handong., Lu, Chaochao., Li, Shuai., Henao, Ricardo. (Dec. 10, 2023)

NeurIPS

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

Ma, Haoyu., Zhao, Handong., Lin, Zhe., Kale, Ajinkya., Wang, Zhangyang., Yu, Tong., Gu, Jiuxiang., Choudhary, Sunav., Xie, Xiaohui. (Sep. 27, 2022)

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

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

Qin, Can., Kim, Sungchul., Zhao, Handong., Yu, Tong., Rossi, Ryan., Fu, Yun. (Aug. 14, 2022)

ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Structured Policy Iteration for Linear Quadratic Regulator

Park, Youngsuk., Rossi, Ryan., Wen, Zheng., Wu, Gang., Zhao, Handong. (Jul. 31, 2020)

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)

Cross-Domain Document Object Detection: Benchmark Suite and Method

Li, Kai., Wigington, Curtis., Tensmeyer, Chris., Zhao, Handong., Barmpalios, Nikolaos., Morariu, Vlad., Manjunatha, Varun., Sun, Tong., Fu, Yun. (Jun. 22, 2020)

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Linear Quadratic Regulator for Resource-Efficient Cloud Services

Park, Youngsuk., Mahadik, Kanak., Rossi, Ryan., Wu, Gang., Zhao, Handong. (Nov. 21, 2019)

ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing

Unpaired Image Captioning via Scene Graph Alignments

Gu, Jiuxiang., Joty, Shafiq., Cai, Jianfei., Zhao, Handong., Yang, Xu., Wang, Gang. (Oct. 27, 2019)

International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)

Log2Intent: Towards Interpretable User Modeling via Recurrent Semantics Memory Units

Tao, Zhiqiang., Li, Sheng., Wang, Zhaowen., Fang, Chen., Yang, Longqi., Zhao, Handong., Fu, Yun. (Aug. 4, 2019)

KDD - ACM SIGKDD CONFERENCE ON KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY AND DATA MINING

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

Jia, Xiaowei., Li, Sheng., Zhao, Handong., Kim, Sungchul., Kumar, Vipin. (Aug. 4, 2019)

KDD

Scene Graph Generation with External Knowledge and Image Reconstruction

Gu, Jiuxiang., Zhao, Handong., Lin, Zhe., Li, Sheng., Cai, Jianfei., Ling, Mingyang. (Jun. 16, 2019)

IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)