Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Princeton University
Email: zhuangl [at] princeton [dot] edu
35 Olden St, Princeton, NJ 08540
Google Scholar
Twitter
LinkedIn
GitHub
Zhuang Liu
[Pronouncing Zhuang]
I'm an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. My research builds AI systems that perceive and understand the world, studies how models work, and explores how to use them to accelerate scientific research.
I value simplicity, and look for clean models, methods, and ideas that make complex systems easier to build and understand. My work has introduced simple, widely used designs in deep networks and efficient models (e.g., DenseNet, ConvNeXt, Network Slimming, Rethinking Pruning, Wanda), and more recently, simple designs and analyses that help explain how multimodal and large language models work (e.g., DyT, MetaMorph, Massive Activations, dataset bias). My work has been recognized by 110,000+ citations and a CVPR Best Paper Award.
Before joining Princeton, I was a Senior Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research in New York. I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where I worked with Trevor Darrell, and my B.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University (Yao Class).
Research Topics
Open Multimodal Foundation Models. We build multimodal models that understand, generate, and reason, and release everything: weights, data, and recipes.
Empirical Science of Foundation Models. How do foundation models work? We run experiments to find out, and turn the answers into simpler, more efficient designs.
AI Agents Toward Assisting Research. We build agents, multi-agent systems, and benchmarks for long-horizon, open-ended problems. The long-term goal: agents that help do research.
Join Us
PhD Students: I am looking for PhD students starting Fall 2027. Apply to Princeton's CS PhD program and mention my name.
Research Interns: I am always excited to collaborate with motivated students on long-term research projects. Get in touch via this form.
Postdocs: Apply to the PLI Postdoctoral Fellow program and mention my name.
Research Group
• Gabe Sarch, PLI Postdoctoral Fellow
• Haozhe (Tony) Chen, PhD Student
• Sachin Konan, PhD Student
• Kechen Liu, PhD Student
• Taiming Lu, PhD Student
• Boya Zeng, PhD Student
• Linrong (Chris) Cai, MSE Student
• Zhuorui Ye, Incoming PhD Student (w/ Danqi Chen)
Talks and News
Selected Publications (* equal contribution, for full list please see Google Scholar)
Teaching
COS 324: Introduction to Machine Learning, Princeton, Spring 2026
COS 597K: Frontiers in Deep Learning, Princeton, Fall 2025
Professional Services
I served or will be serving as an Area Chair for NeurIPS (23, 24, D&B track 22, 24), ICLR (25), ICML (25), CVPR (25, 26), ICCV (23, 25).
I also regularly served as a Reviewer for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and other conferences and journals.