Yongqi Zhang（张永祺）
Assistant Professor
Data Science and Analytics Thrust, HKUST (Guangzhou)
PhD CSE HKUST 2020 · BS SJTU 2015
Guangzhou, China
Understanding the world through knowledge:
Integrating knowledge with data-driven learning to build reliable, efficient AI that understands the world, advances scientific discovery, and solves real-world problems.
Yongqi Zhang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Data Science and Analytics Thrust at HKUST (Guangzhou), which he joined in 2024. His research focuses on multimodal and agentic intelligence, efficient LLM architectures and systems, and AI for science and engineering, with an emphasis on integrating knowledge into learning and reasoning. Before joining HKUST (Guangzhou), he was a Research Scientist at 4Paradigm Inc. Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from HKUST in 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Lei Chen. He received his bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2015.
His research has appeared in journals including Nature Computational Science, Nature Communications, IEEE TPAMI, and Artificial Intelligence, as well as conferences including NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML, ACL/EMNLP, and KDD. He also maintains close collaborations with industry partners, including Tencent, Huawei, Baidu, OPPO, and Noumena AI.
KiMI Lab develops knowledge-integrated AI systems that understand, reason, create, and act.
- Multimodal & Agentic Intelligence — Acquiring and using knowledge for multimodal understanding, retrieval, generation, and agentic reasoning.
- Efficient LLM Architectures & Systems — Efficient LLM training and inference for learning, retaining, and using knowledge.
- AI for Science & Engineering — Integrating domain knowledge with machine learning for biomedicine, materials, and engineering.