Tianle Zhang (张天乐) — PhD Student, NTU

About

I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, advised by Prof. Alvin Chan Guo Wei. My research explores new ways to combine large language models with domain foundation models, aiming for integrations that are both more efficient and more effective. The current focus is on scientific domains — small molecules and proteins — where structured FM representations can complement LLM reasoning.

Before NTU, I received my B.Eng. in Computer Science (with a joint degree in Smart Finance & Blockchain Finance) from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC). I have been fortunate to work with researchers at the Shanghai AI Lab and the NUS HPC-AI Lab on evaluation of generative models and on graph dataset distillation.

Multi-modal LLMs AI for Science Efficient Deep Learning Evaluation of Generative Models Dataset Distillation

I am open to all kinds of novel research directions and always excited by unexplored problems. If you have a collaboration in mind — across disciplines or methodologies — feel free to drop me an email to discuss.

News

May 2026 Recognized as an ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer.
Dec 2025 Our paper on strategic multimodal representation alignment is accepted to AAAI 2026.
Sep 2025 Our paper on training-free multi-modal reasoning via In-Context Representation Learning is accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
Jan 2025 Started my Ph.D. at NTU, advised by Prof. Alvin Chan.
Sep 2024 Awarded the NTU Research Scholarship for Ph.D. studies.
Sep 2024 Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2024 — one first-author (T2V evaluation), one Spotlight (ConvBench).
May 2024 Our paper on lossless graph dataset condensation is accepted to ICML 2024.

Publications

Bold = me. * equal contribution. † corresponding author. Full list on Google Scholar.

AAAI2026

To Align or Not to Align: Strategic Multimodal Representation Alignment for Optimal Performance

Wanlong Fang, Tianle Zhang, Alvin Chan†

Co-authorProceedings of the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

NeurIPS2025

Can LLMs Reason Over Non-Text Modalities in a Training-Free Manner? A Case Study with In-Context Representation Learning

Tianle Zhang*, Wanlong Fang*, Jonathan Woo*, Paridhi Latawa, Deepak A. Subramanian, Alvin Chan†

First authorProceedings of the 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

NeurIPS2024

Rethinking Human Evaluation Protocol for Text-to-Video Models: Enhancing Reliability, Reproducibility, and Practicality

Tianle Zhang, Langtian Ma, Yuchen Yan, Yuchen Zhang, Kai Wang, Yue Yang, Ziyao Guo, Wenqi Shao, Yang You, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo, Kaipeng Zhang†

First authorProceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

NeurIPS2024

ConvBench: A Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark with Hierarchical Capability for Large Vision-Language Models

Shuo Liu, Kaining Ying, Hao Zhang, Yue Yang, Yuqi Lin, Tianle Zhang, Chuanhao Li, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo, Wenqi Shao†, Kaipeng Zhang†

SpotlightCo-authorProceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

ICML2024

Navigating Complexity: Toward Lossless Graph Condensation via Expanding Window Matching

Yuchen Zhang*, Tianle Zhang*, Kai Wang, Ziyao Guo, Yuxuan Liang, Xavier Bresson, Wei Jin, Yang You

Co-first authorProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning.

Awards & Scholarships

NTU Research Scholarship (R-RSS) Graduate College, Nanyang Technological University · 2024
Excellent First-class Scholarship University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · 2023
Xiaomi Scholarship Xiaomi Foundation × UESTC · 2023
Tencent First-class Scholarship Tencent Foundation × UESTC · 2022
NTU Project Scholarship Nanyang Technological University (undergraduate research visit) · 2022
Special Prize · 7th UESTC "Internet Plus" Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition UESTC · 2021