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Zekai Li

PhD Student
University of California, San Diego
zekaili (at) ucsd.edu


About Me

I am an incoming PhD student at UC San Diego supervised by professor Zhijian Liu at Z-Lab. I completed my bachelor’s degree with first class honor at National University of Singapore. I work closely with Dr. Kai Wang and professor Yang You at NUS HPC-AI Lab. I have done research internships at University of Toronto (advised by professor Konstantinos N Plataniotis) and Carnegie Mellon University (advised by professor Alexander Hauptmann). Prior to that, I was a member at NUS WING supervised by Professor Min-Yen Kan.

Research Interests

Research Experience

News

[Apr. 2025] I’ll be joining Z-Lab as a PhD student advised by Professor Zhijian Liu at UC San Diego.
[Feb. 2025] Two papers on dataset distillation and diffusion model acceleration are accepted to CVPR 2025.
[Jun. 2024] I’ve started my research internship at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Professor Alexander Hauptmann and Dr. Zhi-Qi Cheng.
[Mar. 2024] I’ve started my research internship at University of Toronto advised by Professor Konstantinos N Plataniotis.
[Oct. 2023] I’ve joined NUS HPC-AI Lab as a research assistant supervised by Professor Yang You and Dr. Kai Wang.
[May. 2023] I’ve joined NUS WING as an undergraduate researcher supervised by Professor Kan Min-Yen.
[Feb. 2023] My paper on multi-hop question answering is accepted to ICASSP 2023.

Recent Publications


* Equal Contribution, † Project Lead

  1. DD-Ranking: Rethinking the Evaluation of Dataset Distillation
    Zekai Li*†, Xinhao Zhong*, Samir Khaki, Zhiyuan Liang, Yuhao Zhou, Mingjia Shi, Ziqiao Wang, Xuanlei Zhao, Wangbo Zhao, Ziheng Qin, Mengxuan Wu, Pengfei Zhou, Haonan Wang, David Junhao Zhang, Jia-Wei Liu, Shaobo Wang, Dai Liu, Linfeng Zhang, Guang Li, Kun Wang, Zheng Zhu, Zhiheng Ma, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Jiancheng Lv, Yaochu Jin, Peihao Wang, Kaipeng Zhang, Lingjuan Lyu, Yiran Huang, Zeynep Akata, Zhiwei Deng, Xindi Wu, George Cazenavette, Yuzhang Shang, Justin Cui, Jindong Gu, Qian Zheng, Hao Ye, Shuo Wang, Xiaobo Wang, Yan Yan, Angela Yao, Mike Zheng Shou, Tianlong Chen, Hakan Bilen, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Manolis Kellis, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis, Zhangyang Wang, Bo Zhao, Yang You, Kai Wang
    PDF Code Project Page Under Review

  2. CVPR
    Emphasizing Discriminative Features for Dataset Distillation in Complex Scenarios
    Kai Wang*, Zekai Li*, Zhiqi Cheng, Samir Khaki, Ahmad Sajedi, Ramakrishna Vedantam, Konstantinos N Plataniotis, Alexander Hauptmann, and Yang You
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.
    PDF Code Accept

  3. CVPR
    A Closer Look at Time Steps is Worthy of Triple Speed-Up for Diffusion Model Training
    Kai Wang, Yukun Zhou, Mingjia Shi, Zekai Li, Zhihang Yuan, Yuzhang Shang, Xiaojiang Peng, Hanwang Zhang, Yang You
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.
    PDF Code Project Page Accept

  4. Dynamic Vision Mamba
    Mengxuan Wu*, Zekai Li*†, Zhiyuan Liang*, Moyang Li, Xuanlei Zhao, Samir Khaki, Zheng Zhu, Xiaojiang Peng, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis, Kai Wang, Wangbo Zhao, Yang You
    PDF Code Project Page Under Review

  5. Faster Vision Mamba is Rebuilt in Minutes via Merged Token Re-training
    Mingjia Shi1*, Yuhao Zhou2*, Ruiji Yu, Zekai Li, Zhiyuan Liang, Xuanlei Zhao, Xiaojiang Peng, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ramakrishna Vedantam, Wangbo Zhao, Kai Wang, Yang You
    PDF Code Project Page Under Review

  6. Prioritize Alignment in Dataset Distillation
    Zekai Li*, Ziyao Guo*, Wangbo Zhao, Tianle Zhang, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Samir Khaki, Kaipeng Zhang, Ahmad Sajedi, Konstantinos N Plataniotis, Kai Wang, Yang You
    PDF Code Under Review

  7. ICASSP
    Self-Adaptive Reasoning on Sub-Questions for Multi-Hop Question Answering
    Zekai Li, Wei Peng
    IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023.
    PDF Accept (Poster)

    8. See full publication list on Google Scholar

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