About

I'm currently a Staff Research Scientist and Tech Lead at Meta.
Before that I was a visiting scholar in Carnegie Mellon University from Sept 2019 to Dec 2021, advised by Prof.Marios Savvides and Prof. Eric Xing.
I obtained my Ph.D. degree from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in June 2021, supervised by Prof. Kwang-Ting Tim CHENG .
Before starting my Ph.D. study in HKUST in Sept. 2016, I obtained my bachelor’s degree from Fudan University in June. 2016.


Contact

Email: zliubq[at]connect[dot]ust[dot]hk; zechunl[at]andrew[dot]cmu[dot]edu
[Google Scholar] |  [Github]


Research Interest

My research focuses on improving the efficiency and deployability of foundation models through architectural optimization, low-bit quantization, sparsity and etc. Specifically, I am interested in using deep learning to solve the practical problems in the industry such as the limitation of insufficient resources and a trade-off between computation and accuracy. My research focus is mainly on:

  • Large language model pretraining and post-training
  • Neural architecture design and search
  • Quantization, pruning and sparsity
  • Knowledge distillation
  • Efficient vision-languade model

News

  • [Oct 2025] We will organize two workshops at ICCV 2025. [LBQNN] and [COGS]
  • [Sept 2025] We have released Meta's first reasoning LLM: MobileLLM-R1. [model] [code] [paper]
  • [Sept 2025] I will serve as an Area Chair for ICLR 2026.
  • [Sept 2025] Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2025. [ParetoQ] and [RDD]
  • [July 2025] Invited talk at ICML workshop. [TTODLer-FM]
  • [June 2025] One papers accepted to ICCV 2025. [Efficient track anything]
  • [May 2025] Three papers accepted to ICML 2025. [Agent-as-a-judge] [LongVU] [PARQ]
  • [Apr 2025] Invited talk at ICLR workshop. [SCOPE]
  • [Jan 2025] Three papers accepted to ICLR 2025. [SpinQuant] [R-sparse] [Param$\delta$ for Direct Mixing]
  • [Sept 2024] Our SpinQuant technique provided the quantization support for the Meta Connect Live Demos. [post]
  • [Sept 2024] Three papers accepted to EMNLP 2024 — one in the Main Conference, one in Findings, and one in the Industry Track.
  • [Sept 2024] We have released [code] and [model weights] of MobileLLM.
  • [July 2024] Two papers accepted to ACL 2024 Findings.
  • [June 2024] One papers accepted to Scientific Reports. [paper]
  • [May 2024] MobileLLM is accepted to ICML 2024. [paper]
  • [May 2024] Our survey paper on Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are available here.
  • [Apr 2024] Invited talk at [EMC2 workshop] in ASPLOS 2024.
  • [Mar 2024] Invited talk at TinyML forum.
  • [Oct 2023] We released [MiniGPT-v2] .
  • [Sept 2023] One paper accepted to EMNLP 2023. [LLM-FP4]
  • [July 2023] Binary and Ternary Natural Language Generation is accepted to ACL 2023 as Oral Persentation .
  • [June 2023] One paper accepted to TMLR. [paper]
  • [May 2023] One paper accepted to ICML 2023. [paper]
  • [May 2023] We released [LLM-QAT] , the first quantization-aware training solution for LLMs.
  • [Sept 2022] One papers accepted to NeurIPS 2022. [BiT]
  • [July 2022] Two papers accepted to ECCV 2022.
  • [May 2022] One paper accepted to ICML 2022.
  • [Mar 2022] Two papers accepted to CVPR 2022.
  • [Dec 2021] I joined Meta Inc. as a Research Scientise.
  • [Dec 2021] Two papers accepted to AAAI 2022.
  • [Sept 2021] One paper accepted to TIP 2021.
  • [May 2021] One paper accepted to ICML 2021.
  • [Apr 2021] I co-organized a workshop on CVPR 2021:Binary Networks for Computer Vision
  • [Mar 2021] One paper accepted to CVPR 2021.
  • [Jan 2021] One paper accepted to ICLR 2021.
  • [Dec 2020] One paper accepted to AAAI 2021 and one paper accepted to IJCV 2021.
  • [July 2020] Two papers accepted to ECCV 2020.
  • [March 2020] One paper accepted to CVPR 2020.
  • [Sept 2019] I come to Canegie Mellon University as a visiting scholar.

  • Publications (selected)

    Changsheng Zhao*, Ernie Chang*, Zechun Liu*†, Chia-Jung Chang, Wei Wen, Chen Lai, Rick Cao, Yuandong Tian, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra
    † Corresponding Author and Research Lead
    MobileLLM-R1: Exploring the Limits of Sub-Billion Language Model Reasoners with Open Training Recipes
    Paper  |  Models  |  Code

    Zechun Liu, Changsheng Zhao, Hanxian Huang, Sijia Chen, Jing Zhang, Jiawei Zhao, Scott Roy, Lisa Jin, Yunyang Xiong, Yangyang Shi, Lin Xiao, Yuandong Tian, Bilge Soran, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Tijmen Blankevoort, Vikas Chandra
    ParetoQ: Scaling Laws in Extremely Low-Bit LLM Quantization
    Paper  |  Code  |  Models

    Zechun Liu*, Changsheng Zhao*, Igor Fedorov, Bilge Soran, Dhruv Choudhary, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra, Yuandong Tian, Tijmen Blankevoort
    SpinQuant: LLM Quantization with Learned Rotations
    Paper |  Code  |  Post  |  Models

    Zechun Liu, Changsheng Zhao, Forrest Iandola, Chen Lai, Yuandong Tian, Igor Fedorov, Yunyang Xiong, Ernie Chang, Yangyang Shi, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Liangzhen Lai, Vikas Chandra
    MobileLLM: Optimizing Sub-Billion Parameter Language Models for On-Device Use Cases
    Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024.
    Paper  |  Code  |  Models

    Zechun Liu*,Barlas Oguz*, Changsheng Zhao, Ernie Chang, Pierre Stock, Yashar Mehdad, Yangyang Shi, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
    LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models
    ACL 2023 Findings.
    Paper  |  Code

    Yunyang Xiong, Chong Zhou, Xiaoyu Xiang, Lemeng Wu, Chenchen Zhu, Zechun Liu, Saksham Suri, Balakrishnan Varadarajan, Ramya Akula, Forrest Iandola, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Bilge Soran, Vikas Chandra
    Efficient Track Anything
    ICCV 2024.
    Paper  |  Code  |  Project Page  |  Models

    Xiaoqian Shen, Yunyang Xiong, Changsheng Zhao, Lemeng Wu, Jun Chen, Chenchen Zhu, Zechun Liu, Fanyi Xiao, Balakrishnan Varadarajan, Florian Bordes, Zhuang Liu, Hu Xu, Hyunwoo J Kim, Bilge Soran, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Vikas Chandra
    LongVU: Spatiotemporal Adaptive Compression for Long Video-Language Understanding
    ICML 2024.
    Paper  |  Code  |  Project Page

    Mingchen Zhuge, Changsheng Zhao, Dylan Ashley, Wenyi Wang, Dmitrii Khizbullin, Yunyang Xiong, Zechun Liu, Ernie Chang, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Yuandong Tian, Yangyang Shi, Vikas Chandra, Jürgen Schmidhuber
    Agent-as-a-Judge: Evaluate Agents with Agents
    ICML 2024.
    Paper  |  Dataset  |  Code

    Lisa Jin, Jianhao Ma, Zechun Liu, Andrey Gromov, Aaron Defazio, Lin Xiao
    PARQ: Piecewise-Affine Regularized Quantization
    ICML 2024.
    Paper  |  Code

    Zhenyu Zhang, Zechun Liu, Yuandong Tian, Harshit Khaitan, Zhangyang Wang, Steven Li
    R-Sparse: Rank-Aware Activation Sparsity for Efficient LLM Inference
    ICLR 2024.
    Paper  |  Code

    Shih-yang Liu*, Zechun Liu*, Xijie Huang, Pingcheng Dong, Kwang-Ting Cheng
    LLM-FP4: 4-Bit Floating-Point Quantized Transformers
    EMNLP 2023.
    Paper  |  Code

    Jun Chen, Deyao Zhu, Xiaoqian Shen, Xiang Li, Zechun Liu, Pengchuan Zhang, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra, Yunyang Xiong, Mohamed Elhoseiny
    MiniGPT-v2: Large Language Model as a Unified Interface for Vision-Language Multi-Task Learning
    Paper  |  Project Page

    Zechun Liu*, Barlas Oguz*, Aasish Pappu, Yangyang Shi, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi
    Binary and Ternary Natural Language Generation  |  Code ACL 2023 (Oral).
    Paper

    Zechun Liu*, Barlas Oguz*, Aasish Pappu, Lin Xiao, Scott Yih, Meng Li, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Yashar Mehdad
    BiT: Robustly Binarized Multi-Distilled Transformer
    Paper  |  Code NeurIPS 2022.

    Shih-Yang Liu*, Zechun Liu*, Kwang-Ting Cheng
    Oscillation-Free Quantization for Low-Bit Vision Transformers
    ICML 2023.
    Paper  |  Code

    Zechun Liu, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Dong Huang, Eric P Xing, Zhiqiang Shen
    Nonuniform-to-Uniform Quantization: Towards Accurate Quantization via Generalized Straight-Through Estimation
    CVPR 2022.
    Paper  |  Code

    Zechun Liu*, Zhiqiang Shen*, Shichao Li, Koen Helwegen, Dong Huang, Kwang-Ting Cheng.
    How Do Adam and Training Strategies Help BNNs Optimization
    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2021.
    Code & Models  |  Paper

    Zechun Liu, Zhiqiang Shen, Marios Savvides, Kwang-Ting Cheng.
    ReActNet: Towards Precise Binary NeuralNetwork with Generalized Activation Functions
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.
    Code & Models  |  Paper
    We achieve 65.9% (ResNet-based) and 69.5% (MobileNet-based) top-1 accuracy on ImageNet (the new results are slightly higher than those in our original paper after we fix a small loading bug), for the first time, exceeding the benchmarking ResNet-level accuracy (69.3%) while achieving more than 22× reduction in computational complexity.

    Zichao Guo, Xiangyu Zhang, Haoyuan Mu, Wen Heng, Zechun Liu, Yichen Wei, Jian Sun.
    Single Path One-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Uniform Sampling
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020.
    Code & Models  |  Paper

    Zechun Liu, Haoyuan Mu, Xiangyu Zhang, Zichao Guo, Xin Yang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Jian Sun.
    MetaPruning: Meta Learning for Automatic Neural Network Channel Pruning
    IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019.
    Code & Models  |  Paper

    Zechun Liu, Baoyuan Wu, Wenhan Luo, Xin Yang, Wei Liu, Kwang-Ting Cheng.
    Bi-Real Net: Enhancing the Performance of 1-bit CNNs with Improved Representational Capability and Advanced Training Algorithm
    European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018.
    Code & Models  |  Paper

    Koen Helwegen, James Widdicombe, Lukas Geiger, Zechun Liu, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Roeland Nusselder.
    Latent Weights Do Not Exist: Rethinking Binarized Neural Network Optimization
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 pre-proceedings (NIPS), 2019.
    Code & Models  |  Paper

    Academic Services

      Conference Reviewer
    • IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, 2022
    • International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021
    • European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022
    • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2022
    • Adcances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021, 2022
    • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022
    • Journal Reviewer
    • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2022 -- Present
    • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2020 -- Present
    • IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2020 -- Present

    Awards and Honors

    • SENG Academic Award for Continuing PhD Students 2019-20
    • Postgraduate Studentship, HKUST 2016-2020
    • Oversea Research Award, HKUST 2019
    • Shanghai Outstanding Graduate, Fudan University 2016
    • Chinese National Scholarship, Fudan University 2012-2013 & 2013-2014

    Teaching Assistant

    • 2017.2 - 2016.6, HKUST, ELEC 2300 Computer Organization
    • 2017.9 - 2018.1, HKUST, ELEC 4010K Machine Learning and Information Processing for Robotic Perception
    • 2017.2 - 2016.6, HKUST, ELEC 2300 Computer Organization