Qiao Zhao | University of Macau

About Me

I am a 1st-year PhD in CS student at the University of Macau, supervised by Prof. Hou Pong Chan. Prior to this, I was an M.S. in AI student at Boston University, working with Prof. Najoung Kim and Prof. Sebastian Schuster. I received my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at Xiamen University, where I was privileged to be advised by Prof. Chen Lin. Currently, I am working on understanding and interpreting (vision) language models. I’m especially interested in how language backbones process and leverage heterogeneous multimodal inputs, and how they perform certain capabilities.

Research Interests

Interpretability: Natural Language Processing, Mechanistic Interpretability, (Multimodal) Language Models
Prev: Recommendation Systems, Graphs/Hypergraphs

News

[Aug. 2026] Started my PhD studies at the University of Macau!🇲🇴🇲🇴🇲🇴
[Jul. 2026] I was in Seoul for ICML! Had lots of fun & cocktails.🇰🇷🇰🇷🇰🇷
[May. 2026] One paper on Mechanistic Interpretability and Entity Tracking accepted to ICML2026.
[Sep. 2024] Started my Master’s study at Boston University.
[Jun. 2024] Received my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at Xiamen University.🎉🎉🎉
[May 2024] Defended my thesis: Hypergraph Enhanced Contrastive Learning in Recommender Systems.🎉🎉🎉

Publications

Who To Align With: Feedback-Oriented Multi-Modal Alignment in Recommendation Systems

Yang Li, Qi’ao Zhao, Chen Lin*, Jinsong Su, Zhilin Zhang.

International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2024.

Code Poster

GENET: Unleashing the Power of Side Information for Recommendation via Hypergraph Pre-training

Yang Li, Qiao Zhao, Chen Lin*, Zhenjie Zhang, Xiaomin Zhu, Jinsong Su

International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA), 2024.

PDF Code To Appear

Do Language Models Track Entities Across State Changes

Zilu Tang^* and Qiao Zhao^* and Gabriel Franco and Derry Tanti Wijaya and Aaron Mueller and Sebastian Schuster and Najoung Kim

Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026.

Poster

Blogs & Writing Samples

I plan to maintain a WeChat official account for non-research & usually alcohol-affected blog posts.