Yongqi Zhang
Assistant Professor
Data Science and Analytics Thrust, HKUST (Guangzhou)
PhD CSE HKUST 2020 · BS SJTU 2015
Guangzhou, China
Designing intelligent systems that reason with knowledge, retrieval, and scientific structure.
Yongqi Zhang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Data Science and Analytics Thrust at HKUST (Guangzhou). His research focuses on multimodal reasoning, retrieval-augmented generation, LLM agents, and AI for X, with an emphasis on developing AI systems that can understand, retrieve, reason, and act across modalities and domains. 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.
He has published over 40 papers in leading journals and conferences, including Nature Computational Science, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, and KDD, among others. He also maintains close collaborations with industry partners, including Tencent, Huawei, OPPO, and Noumena AI.
KiMI Lab
KiMI is dedicated to Knowledge-integrated Machine Intelligence, with a focus on building AI systems that understand, retrieve, reason, and act across modalities and domains.
- Multimodal Reasoning — Understanding and reasoning across vision, language, and structured knowledge.
- RAG Systems — Multimodal search, retrieval, ranking, and grounded generation over large-scale corpora.
- LLM Agents — Planning, memory, tool use, verification, and multi-agent collaboration for complex problem solving.
- AI for X — Knowledge-enhanced foundation models and intelligent systems for biology, materials, and engineering.