Zhuowan Li (李卓婉)

I am a software engineer at Google Deepmind. I am currently working on Gemini post-training, with a focus on personalization and open-ended questions.

I finished my Ph.D. in Feb 2024 from Johns Hopkins University, co-advised by Prof. Alan Yuille and Benjamin Van Durme. I am a member of the CCVL lab. I received my B.E. degree from Tsinghua Univeristy in 2018, where I double major in Electronic Engineering and Journalism and Communication. I have also interned at Amazon AWS, Meta AI, Adobe Research and Sensetime.

In part time, I am a big fan of outdoor sports including rock climbing, snowboarding, skiing, hiking, mountaineering, etc. I am learning tennis recently.

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profile photo

Email: lizhuowan14 at gmail dot com
News
  • [Nov 2024] I will attend EMNLP 2024 in person at Miami. Happy to connect!
  • [June 2024] I will attend CVPR 2024 in person at Seattle. Happy to chat!
  • [Feb 2024] I graduated from JHU and joined Google as a software engineer!
  • [June 2023] I will attend CVPR 2023 in person at Vancouver. Let me know if you want to talk with me!
  • [May 2023] Started as as applied scentist intern at Amazon AWS.
  • [May 2023] Invited talk at the Computational Cognitive Science Lab at MIT.
  • [February 2023] Super-CLEVR is accepted by CVPR 2023 as Highlight.

    • Last updated: 2025/08/12.

    Publications
    Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities
    Gemini Team, Google
    Technical Report, 2025
    arXiv

    Effective Training Data Synthesis for Improving MLLM Chart Understanding
    Yuwei Yang, Zeyu Zhang, Yunzhong Hou, Zhuowan Li, Gaowen Liu, Ali Payani, Yuan-Sen Ting, Liang Zheng
    ICCV, 2025
    arXiv

    Retrieval Augmented Generation or Long-Context LLMs? A Comprehensive Study and Hybrid Approach
    Zhuowan Li, Cheng Li, Mingyang Zhang, Qiaozhu Mei, Michael Bendersky
    EMNLP Industry Track, 2024
    arXiv / poster

    ExoViP: Step-by-step Verification and Exploration with Exoskeleton Modules for Compositional Visual Reasoning
    Yuxuan Wang, Alan Yuille, Zhuowan Li*, Zilong Zheng*
    COLM, 2024
    arXiv / code

    Synthesize Step-by-Step: Tools, Templates and LLMs as Data Generators for Reasoning-Based Chart VQA
    Zhuowan Li*, Bhavan Jasani*, Peng Tang, Shabnam Ghadar
    CVPR, 2024
    arXiv

    Causal-CoG: A Causal-Effect Look at Context Generation for Boosting Multi-modal Language Models
    Shitian Zhao, Zhuowan Li, Yadong Lu, Alan Yuille, Yan Wang
    CVPR (Highlight, top 2.8%), 2024
    arXiv / code

    On the Diagnosis and Generalization of Compositional Visual Reasoning
    Zhuowan Li
    Ph.D. thesis, 2024
    pdf

    Localization vs. Semantics: How Can Language Benefit Visual Representation Learning?
    Zhuowan Li, Cihang Xie, Benjamin Van Durme, Alan Yuille
    EACL, 2024
    arXiv / code (to be released)

    3D-Aware Visual Question Answering about Parts, Poses and Occlusions
    Xingrui Wang, Wufei Ma, Zhuowan Li, Adam Kortylewski, Alan Yuille
    NeurIPS, 2023
    arXiv / code and dataset

    Super-CLEVR: A Virtual Benchmark to Diagnose Domain Robustness in Visual Reasoning
    Zhuowan Li, Xingrui Wang, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Adam Kortylewski, Wufei Ma, Benjamin Van Durme, Alan Yuille
    CVPR (Highlight, top 2.5%), 2023
    project page / arXiv / code and dataset

    Visual Commonsense in Pretrained Unimodal and Multimodal Models
    Chenyu Zhang Benjamin Van Durme, Zhuowan Li*, Elias Stengel-Eskin*,
    NAACL (Oral), 2022
    arXiv / code and dataset

    SwapMix: Diagnosing and Regularizing the Over-Reliance on Visual Context in Visual Question Answering
    Vipul Gupta, Zhuowan Li, Adam Kortylewski, Chenyu Zhang, Yingwei Li, Alan Yuille
    CVPR, 2022
    arXiv / code

    Calibrating Concepts and Operations: Towards Symbolic Reasoning on Real Images
    Zhuowan Li, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Yixiao Zhang, Cihang Xie, Quan Tran, Benjamin Van Durme, Alan Yuille
    ICCV, 2021
    arXiv / code

    Context-Aware Group Captioning via Self-Attention and Contrastive Features
    Zhuowan Li, Quan Tran, Long Mai, Zhe Lin, Alan Yuille
    CVPR, 2020
    arXiv / project page

    FD-GAN: Pose-guided Feature Distilling GAN for Robust Person Re-identification
    Yixiao Ge*, Zhuowan Li*, Haiyu Zhao, Guojun Yin, Shuai Yi, Xiaogang Wang, Hongsheng Li
    NeurIPS, 2018
    arXiv / project page / code


    Website theme stolen from Jon Barron.