I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Artificial Intelligence at the School of Science, Engineering and Digital Technologies, University of Southern Queensland (UniSQ), Australia. I received my Ph.D. from The University of Queensland (UQ) in 2023 — honoured with the Dean’s Award for Outstanding HDR Theses — under the supervision of Prof. Zi (Helen) Huang. I subsequently held postdoctoral and research fellow positions at UQ before joining UniSQ in 2025.

🔬 My research sits at the frontier of machine learning and computer vision, driven by a fundamental question: how can AI reliably recognise and reason about what it has never seen before? I develop methods in zero-shot & few-shot learning, vision–language models, continual learning, and generative modelling — building systems that generalise beyond labelled data and operate robustly in open, ever-changing environments. My work has appeared in top-tier venues including CVPR, ICCV, AAAI, ACM MM, IJCAI, NeurIPS, PR, TMM and Nature Portfolio journals.

🌾 I lead interdisciplinary AI projects tackling real-world problems, particularly in AI for Agriculture — large-scale crop disease recognition, plant phenotyping, and precision farming tools to help safeguard global food security where label scarcity demands the generalisable models I specialise in. Together, these projects have attracted over $900K in competitive funding from GRDC, Department of Education, CSIRO, and the Queensland Government.

🏅 My research has been recognised with the Best Student Paper Award at ACM MM 2023, Best Student Paper Award at PAKDD 2024, 1st Place at the CVPPA@ECCV 2024 Challenge, and the ECR Research Staff Award at UniSQ 2025, among others.

🚀 I am actively looking for motivated Ph.D. students, Master’s students, Research Assistants, and Visiting Scholars who are passionate about computer vision and applied AI. If you are excited about building AI that generalises — and making it count in the real world — I’d love to hear from you!

Zero-Shot Learning Computer Vision Vision-Language Models AI for Agriculture AI for Healthcare Domain Adaptation Continual Learning Diffusion Models Image/Video Generation

🔥 News

2026.02: One RUIC program project ($100,000) has been granted by the Queensland Government and CSIRO.
2026.02: One AEA Ignite Project ($549,886) has been granted by the Department of Education.
2026.02: One GRDC grant ($250,000) on Exploring Data Efficient Machine Learning for Australian Grains Disease Recognition has been awarded.
2025.12： Our dataset paper PlantSeg has been accepted to Scientific Data (Nature Portfolio, JCR Q1, IF: 6.9).
2025.12: I gave a talk on AI for Agriculture in the AI4Impact Research Symposium, hosted by UniSQ Business School and SRMIST India.
2025.12: I gave a tutorial on zero-shot learning in DICTA2025.

2025.11: Our paper on Diffusion Quantization has been accepted to AAAI 2026, paper coming soon.
2025.10: My first-author paper “Distribution Zero-Shot Learning for Visual recognition” has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (JCR Q1, Core A*, IF:9.7). Paper coming soon.
2025.10: My first-author paper on Few-Shot Vision-Language Model Adaptation has been accepted to the journal Pattern Recognition (JCR Q1, Core A*, IF:7.6).
2025.10: My first author paper on Single-Image Editing has been accepted to the Special Issue: Beneficial Noise Learning in the journal Pattern Recognition (JCR Q1) (Core A*).
2025.08: Our Global Wheat Full Semantic Organ Segmentation (GWFSS) Dataset has been accepted to Plant Phenomics (JCR Q1, IF 6.4, No.1 Journal for Phenotyping). Project Page
2025.08: Our benchmark on video generative models for video retrieval has been accepted to ACM MM Dataset Track.
2025.07: One paper on Test-Time Adaptation has been accepted to ACM MM 2025. Paper coming soon.
2025.06: My first author paper on Zero-Shot Learning has been accepted to ICCV 2025.
2025.05: Serve as Guest Editor for Complex & Intelligent Systems (JCR-Q1) (Special Issue on Efficient AI for Resource-Constrained and Complex Applications).
2025.04: One paper on Continual Learning has been accepted to IJCAI 2025.
2025.04: One paper on Continual Text-to-Video Retrieval has been accepted to SIGIR 2025.
2025.04: I have joined the University of Southern Queensland as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) after working as a Postdoc at UQ for two years.
2024.12: One paper on Source-free Open-Set Domain Adaptation has been accepted to AAAI 2025.
2024.10: One paper on Class-Agnostic Object Detection has been accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
2024.09: Our Coarse-to-Fine Prototype Refining Network for Point Cloud Completion and Reconstruction for CVPPA@ECCV 2024 challenge won the first place solution!
2024.07: One paper on In-the-wild Multimodal Disease Recognition has been accepted to ACM MM 2024.

📚 Publications

2026

	Learning Multi-Modal Prototypes for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection Wanqi Wang, Jingcai Guo, Yuxiang Cai, Zhi Chen* CVPR 2026 Findings (Core A)* Few-Shot paper
	TR-DQ: Time-Rotation Diffusion Quantization Yihua Shao, et al., Zhi Chen, Jingcai Guo The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI 2026 (Core A)* Diffusion paper
	Distributed Zero-Shot Learning for Visual Recognition Zhi Chen, Yadan Luo, Zi Huang, Jingjing Li, Sen Wang, Xin Yu IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (Core A, IF: 9.7)* ZSL paper

2025

	PlantSeg: A Large-Scale In-the-wild Dataset for Plant Disease Segmentation Tianqi Wei, Zhi Chen, Xin Yu, Scott Chapman, Paul Melloy, Zi Huang Scientific Data (Nature Portfolio) AI for Agriculture Paper / code / dataset
	Cluster-Aware Prompt Ensemble Learning for Few-Shot Vision-Language Model Adaptation Zhi Chen, Xin Yu, Xiaohui Tao, Yan Li, Zi Huang Pattern Recognition (PR) (Core A) (IF: 7.6)* VLM Paper
	FastEdit: Fast Text-Guided Single-Image Editing via Semantic-Aware Diffusion Fine-Tuning Zhi Chen, Zecheng Zhao, Yadan Luo, Yan Li, Xiaohui Tao, Zi Huang Pattern Recognition (PR) (Core A) (IF: 7.6)* Image Editing Paper / code
	The Global Wheat Full Semantic Organ Segmentation (GWFSS) Dataset Zijian Wang, ..., Zhi Chen, ... et, al. Plant Phenomics (Q1) (IF: 6.4) AI for Agriculture Paper / Project
	Are Synthetic Videos Useful? A Benchmark for Retrieval-Centric Evaluation of Synthetic Videos Zecheng Zhao, Selena Song, Tong Chen, Zhi Chen, Shazia Sadiq, Yadan Luo ACM MM 2025 Video arXiv
	PatAug: Augmentation of Augmentation for Test-Time Adaptation Xinyao Li, Dan Zhang, Zhekai Du, Lei Zhu, Zhi Chen, Jingjing Li ACM MM 2025 DA Paper
	SVIP: Semantically Contextualized Visual Patches for Zero-Shot Learning Zhi Chen, Zecheng Zhao, Jingcai Guo, Jingjing Li, Zi Huang ICCV 2025 ZSL Paper
	Continual Text-to-Video Retrieval with Frame Fusion and Task-Aware Routing Zecheng Zhao, Zhi Chen, Zi Huang, Shazia Sadiq, Tong Chen SIGIR 2025 (Core A)* CL arXiv
	On the Discrimination and Consistency for Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning Tianqi Wang, Jingcai Guo, Depeng Li, Zhi Chen IJCAI 2025 CL arXiv
	Dynamic Target Distribution Estimation for Source-free Open-Set Domain Adaptation Zhiqi Yu, Zhichao Liao, Jingjing Li, Zhi Chen, Lei Zhu The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI 2025 (Core A) DA paper
	Physics-Informed Machine Learning Offers Multi-Scale Remote Estimation of Wheat Biomass Dynamics Qiaomin Chen, Zhi Chen*, et al. (Co-First Author) IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium 2025 (IGARSS)* AI for Agriculture paper (coming soon)

2024

	DiPEx: Dispersing Prompt Expansion for Class-Agnostic Object Detection Jia Syuen Lim, Zhuoxiao Chen, Zhi Chen, Mahsa Baktashmotlagh, Xin Yu, Zi Huang, Yadan Luo NeurIPS 2024 Object Detection arXiv / code
	Benchmarking In-the-wild Multimodal Disease Recognition and A Versatile Baseline Tianqi Wei, Zhi Chen, Zi Huang, Xin Yu ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM) 2024. (Core A) AI for Agriculture arXiv / code / dataset
	CF-PRNet: Coarse-to-Fine Prototype Refining Network for Point Cloud Completion and Reconstruction Zhi Chen, Tianqi Wei, Zecheng Zhao, Jia Syuen Lim, Yadan Luo, Hu Zhang, Xin Yu, Scott Chapman, Zi Huang 1st Place solution to CVPPA@ECCV2024: Shape Completion and Reconstruction of Sweet Peppers Challenge. AI for Agriculture arXiv / code / competition
	Track Any Peppers: Weakly Supervised Sweet Pepper Tracking Using VLMs Jia Syuen Lim, Yadan Luo, Zhi Chen, Tianqi Wei, Scott Chapman, Zi Huang 2st Place solution to CVPPA@ECCV2024: Detection and Multi-Object Tracking of Sweet Peppers Challenge. AI for Agriculture paper / competition
	Snap and Diagnose: An Advanced Multimodal Retrieval System for Identifying Plant Diseases in the Wild Tianqi Wei, Zhi Chen, Xin Yu, Scott Chapman, Paul Melloy, Zi Huang ACM International Conference on Multimedia in Asia 2024. AI for Agriculture paper
	Towards Cost-Efficient Federated Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Learnable Aggregation Yi Zhang, Sen Wang, Zhi Chen, Xuwei Xu, Stano Funiak, Frank de Hoog, Jiajun Liu The Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) 2024. (Best Student Paper Award)* RL paper
	On the Element-Wise Representation and Reasoning in Zero-Shot Image Recognition: A Systematic Survey Jingcai Guo, Zhijie Rao, Zhi Chen, Song Guo, Jingren Zhou, Dacheng Tao pre-print ZSL arXiv
	Secondary analysis of newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes subgroups and treatment responses in the MARCH cohort Weihao Wang, Xiaobei Li, Fei Chen, Ran Wei, Zhi Chen, Jingjing Li, Jingtao Qiao, Qi Pan, Wenjing Yang, Lixin Guo Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews. 2024. (IF:10.0)* AI for Healthcare paper

2023

	Zero-Shot Learning by Harnessing Adversarial Samples Zhi Chen, Pengfei Zhang, Jingjing Li, Sen Wang, Zi Huang ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2023 ZSL arXiv / code
	Federated Zero-Shot Learning for Visual Recognition Zhi Chen, Yan Luo, Sen Wang, Jingjing Li, Zi Huang pre-print ZSL arXiv
	Cal-SFDA: Source-Free Domain-adaptive Semantic Segmentation with Differentiable Expected Calibration Error Zixin Wang, Yadan Luo, Zhi Chen, Sen Wang, Zi Huang ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2023 DA arXiv / code
	Optimizing Taxi Route Planning Based on Taxi Trajectory Data Analysis Xinyi Yang, Zhi Chen, Yadan Luo Australasian Database Conference (ADC) 2023.* AI for Transport paper

2022

	GSMFlow: Generation Shifts Mitigating Flow for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Zhi Chen, Yadan Luo, Sen Wang, Jingjing Li, Zi Huang IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) (JCR Q1, Core A, IF: 9.7)* ZSL paper / code
	Distinguishing Unseen from Seen for Generalized Zero-shot Learning Hongzu Su, Jingjing Li, Zhi Chen, Lei Zhu, Ke Lu The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022. (Core A)* ZSL Paper / code
	Pixel Exclusion: Uncertainty-aware Boundary Discovery for Active Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation Fuming You, Jingjing Li, Zhi Chen, Lei Zhu ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM) 2022. (Core A) DA paper
	Application of novel subgroups of Chinese inpatients with diabetes based on machine learning paradigm Weihao Wang, Zhi Chen, Sen Wang, Fei Chen, Mingqun Deng, Qi Pan, Lixin Guo Diabetes & Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews. 2022. (JCR Q1) (IF:10.0) (Co-first Author) AI for Healthcare paper
	FluMA: An Intelligent Platform for Influenza Monitoring and Analysis Xi Chen, Zhi Chen, Zijian Wang, Ruihong Qiu, Yadan Luo Australasian Database Conference 2022* AI for Healthcare paper

2021

	Semantics Disentangling for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Zhi Chen, Yadan Luo, Ruihong Qiu, Sen Wang, Zi Huang, Jingjing Li, Zheng Zhang ICCV 2021. (Core A)* ZSL paper / code
	Mitigating Generation Shifts for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Zhi Chen, Yadan Luo, Sen Wang, Ruihong Qiu, Jingjing Li, Zi Huang ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM) 2021. (Core A)* ZSL paper / code
	Entropy-Based Uncertainty Calibration for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning Zhi Chen, Zi Huang, Jingjing Li, Zheng Zhang 2021 Australasian Database Conference. (Best student paper – Highly Commended) ZSL arXiv
	Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation without Source Data Fuming You, Jingjing Li, Lei Zhu, Zhi Chen, Zi Huang ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM) 2021. (Core A) DA paper / code
	Local Graph Convolutional Networks for Cross-Modal Hashing Yudong Chen, Sen Wang, Jianlin Lu, Zhi Chen, Zheng Zhang, Zi Huang ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM) 2021. (Core A) Hashing paper / code
	CausalRec: Causal Inference for Visual Debiasing in Visually-Aware Recommendation Ruihong Qiu, Sen Wang, Zhi Chen, Hongzhi Yin, Zi Huang ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM) 2021. (Core A) Rec paper / code
	Application of new international classification of adult-onset diabetes in Chinese inpatients with diabetes mellitus Weihao Wang, Xiaobei Pei, Lina Zhang, Zhi Chen, Dong Lin, Xiaoye Duan, Jingwen Fan, Qi Pan, Lixin Guo Diabetes/Metabolism Research and Reviews. 2021. (IF: 8.02)* AI for Science paper

2020

CANZSL: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Networks for Zero-Shot Learning from Natural Language
Zhi Chen, Jingjing Li, Yadan Luo, Zi Huang, Yang Yang
The IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2020. (Core A)

ZSL

arXiv / code

Rethinking Generative Zero-Shot Learning: An Ensemble Learning Perspective for Recognising Visual Patches
Zhi Chen, Sen Wang, Jingjing Li, Zi Huang
ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2020.* (Core A*)

ZSL

paper / code

💰 Research Grants

$474,886 AEA Ignite Project

Construction-AI: AI-Powered Compliance Review for Australian Building Sites


Funding Agency	Department of Education, Queensland Government
Program	AEA Ignite Project Grant
Period	2026
Role	Co-Investigator
Team	Dr Taotao Cai (Lead), Professor Yan Li, Dr Zhi Chen, Dr Wencheng Yang

Develop a “Construction-AI” system that understands the unique language, regulations, and rules of Australian building sites. The system will help small businesses in the construction sector reduce administrative burdens and improve workplace safety by instantly reviewing documents — such as contracts, safety plans, and compliance forms — for regulatory gaps and potential risks. By automating document compliance review with domain-specific AI, the project aims to reduce manual checking time and lower the risk of on-site accidents linked to overlooked requirements.

$100,000 RUIC Program

Embodied AI Robots for Interactive K–12 Education


Funding Agency	Queensland Government & CSIRO (RUIC Program)
Period	Nov 2025 – Nov 2026 (12 months)
Role	Lead Investigator
Industry Partner	JR Academy
Total Project Value	$166,655 (incl. $66,655 UniSQ in-kind)

Develop a new generation of educational robots powered by embodied AI to engage and inspire students across K–12 levels. Unlike traditional screen-based tools, these robots provide interactive, multi-sensory experiences — using natural language understanding, gesture-based interaction, and real-time emotional feedback — to make abstract STEM concepts tangible and engaging. The project follows four phases: (1) co-design with educators and students, (2) AI development and robotic integration using the LeRobot platform, (3) pilot deployment in two partner schools, and (4) evaluation and refinement. Special emphasis is placed on inclusivity, ensuring the robots adapt to diverse learning paces, styles, and needs.

Key Deliverables: Design specification, embodied AI interaction prototype, classroom deployment toolkit, and evaluation report.

$250,000 GRDC

Exploring Data Efficient Machine Learning for Australian Grains Disease Recognition


Funding Agency	Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC)
Role	Lead CI
Investigators	Zhi Chen (Lead CI), Derek Long, Noel Knight

Develop and deploy deep learning models for automated detection, segmentation, and monitoring of plant diseases and crop health in grain crops. Leveraging large-scale annotated datasets and vision-language models, the project aims to provide growers and agronomists with scalable, real-time AI tools that improve early disease identification, reduce crop losses, and support more informed farm management decisions.

🏆 Awards & Honors

🏅 ECR Research Staff Award, School of MPC, UniSQ (2025) — Acknowledging outstanding research achievements and potential as an early career researcher.
🥇 1st Place, CVPPA@ECCV2024 Challenge — Shape Completion and Reconstruction of Sweet Peppers, European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) (2024)
🏅 Outstanding Reviewer, ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM) (2024)
🏅 Best Student Paper Award, Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) (2024) — with Yi Zhang, Sen Wang, Xuwei Xu, Stano Funiak, Jiajun Liu
🏅 Dean’s Award for Outstanding Higher Degree by Research Theses, The University of Queensland (UQ) (2023)
🏅 Best Student Paper Award, ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM) (2023) — with Zixin Wang, Yadan Luo, Sen Wang, Zi Huang
🏅 Best Student Paper (Highly Commended), Australasian Database Conference (ADC) (2021) — with Zi Huang, Jingjing Li, Zheng Zhang

🧑🏻‍🏫 Teaching

Course	Institution	Period	Role	Rating
CSC3600 ICT Professional Project	UniSQ	2025 T3	Course Coordinator	5.0
CSC6200 Advanced ICT Professional Project	UniSQ	2025 T3	Course Coordinator	4.3
CSC1310 Network 1: Internetworking	UniSQ	2025 T3	Course Coordinator	3.9
CSC8510 Internetworking	UniSQ	2025 T3	Course Coordinator	—
CSC8470 Server-side Web Technology	UniSQ	2025 T2	Course Coordinator	4.6
CSC1410 Software Engineering Foundations	UniSQ	2025 T2	Course Coordinator	3.8
CSC8710 Software Design and Modelling	UniSQ	2025 T2	Course Coordinator	—
DATA7002 Responsible Data Science	UQ	2024 T2	Co-Instructor	4.28
INFS3208 Cloud Computing	UQ	2024 T2	Co-Instructor	4.53
INFS7450 Advanced Database Systems	UQ	2024 T2	Co-Instructor	4.63
DATA7002 Responsible Data Science	UQ	2023 T2	Co-Instructor	4.21

👔 Services

Conference Service

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2022-2024
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2023
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022, 2024
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM) 2021-2024 (Outstanding Reviewer @ 2024)
AAAI Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2022-2024
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023

Journal Editorship

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) 2024
International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) 2024
IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM) 2022-2023
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT) 2023-2024
IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS) 2023