Zekai Li

PhD Student · University of California, San Diego

I am a first-year PhD student at UC San Diego supervised by Professor Zhijian Liu at Z-Lab. I completed my bachelor’s degree with first-class honours at the National University of Singapore, where I was mentored by Dr. Kai Wang and Professor Yang You.

My research focuses on building efficient embodied AI, such as VLA and WAM.

I’m open to collaboration or discussion about any research topics. Feel free to contact me at zekaili@ucsd.edu.

Zekai Li

Selected Publications

* Equal contribution   ·   † Project lead

  1. FlashVLA: Streaming Action Decoding for Fast and Asynchronous VLA Inference

    Zekai Li, Jiaming Tang, Zhijian Liu

    Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2026.

    paper code blog

  2. FlashDrive: Flash Vision-Language-Action Inference for Autonomous Driving

    Zekai Li*, Yihao Liang*, Hongfei Zhang, Jian Chen, Yesheng Liang, Zhijian Liu

    Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2026.

    paper code blog

  3. DD-Ranking: Rethinking the Evaluation of Dataset Distillation

    Zekai Li*†, Xinhao Zhong*, et al. Full author list

    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

    Under Review

    paper code project page

  4. 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.

    paper code

  5. 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.

    paper code project page

See the full publication list on Google Scholar.