[Kaiwen Zha]
Kaiwen Zha
Ph.D. Candidate, MIT CSAIL
Email: kzha (at) mit.edu
About Me
I am a final-year Ph.D. student at MIT CSAIL, advised by Prof. Dina Katabi. Previously, I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2020. I have spent time interning at Meta GenAI (2025), Google DeepMind (2024), and MIT CSAIL (2019). (more)
(* indicates equal contribution)
@article{zha2025rl,
  title={RL Tango: Reinforcing Generator and Verifier Together for Language Reasoning},
  author={Zha, Kaiwen and Gao, Zhengqi and Shen, Maohao and Hong, Zhang-Wei and Boning, Duane S and Katabi, Dina},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.15034},
  year={2025}
}
@article{gao2025reg,
  title={REG: Rectified Gradient Guidance for Conditional Diffusion Models},
  author={Gao, Zhengqi and Zha, Kaiwen and Zhang, Tianyuan and Xue, Zihui and Boning, Duane S},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.18865},
  year={2025}
}
@inproceedings{zha2025language,
  title={Language-guided image tokenization for generation},
  author={Zha, Kaiwen and Yu, Lijun and Fathi, Alireza and Ross, David A and Schmid, Cordelia and Katabi, Dina and Gu, Xiuye},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference},
  pages={15713--15722},
  year={2025}
}
@inproceedings{zha2023rank,
  title={Rank-N-Contrast: Learning Continuous Representations for Regression},
  author={Zha, Kaiwen and Cao, Peng and Son, Jeany and Yang, Yuzhe and Katabi, Dina},
  booktitle={Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year={2023}
}
@inproceedings{he2023indiscriminate,
  title={Indiscriminate Poisoning Attacks on Unsupervised Contrastive Learning},
  author={Hao He and Kaiwen Zha and Dina Katabi},
  booktitle={The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year={2023}
}
@article{yue2022cornerradar,
  title={CornerRadar: RF-based indoor localization around corners},
  author={Yue, Shichao and He, Hao and Cao, Peng and Zha, Kaiwen and Koizumi, Masayuki and Katabi, Dina},
  journal={Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies},
  volume={6},
  number={1},
  pages={1--24},
  year={2022},
  publisher={ACM New York, NY, USA}
}
@inproceedings{pang2022unsupervised,
  title={Unsupervised representation for semantic segmentation by implicit cycle-attention contrastive learning},
  author={Pang, Bo and Li, Yizhuo and Zhang, Yifan and Peng, Gao and Tang, Jiajun and Zha, Kaiwen and Li, Jiefeng and Lu, Cewu},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI conference on artificial intelligence},
  volume={36},
  number={2},
  pages={2044--2052},
  year={2022}
}
@inproceedings{yang2021delving,
  title={Delving into deep imbalanced regression},
  author={Yang, Yuzhe and Zha, Kaiwen and Chen, Yingcong and Wang, Hao and Katabi, Dina},
  booktitle={International conference on machine learning},
  pages={11842--11851},
  year={2021},
  organization={PMLR}
}
@article{zha2021unsupervised,
  title={Unsupervised image transformation learning via generative adversarial networks},
  author={Zha, Kaiwen and Shen, Yujun and Zhou, Bolei},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.07751},
  year={2021}
}
@article{pang2020complex,
  title={Complex sequential understanding through the awareness of spatial and temporal concepts},
  author={Pang, Bo and Zha, Kaiwen and Cao, Hanwen and Tang, Jiajun and Yu, Minghui and Lu, Cewu},
  journal={Nature Machine Intelligence},
  volume={2},
  number={5},
  pages={245--253},
  year={2020},
  publisher={Nature Publishing Group UK London}
}
@inproceedings{pang2020further,
  title={Further understanding videos through adverbs: A new video task},
  author={Pang, Bo and Zha, Kaiwen and Zhang, Yifan and Lu, Cewu},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  volume={34},
  number={07},
  pages={11823--11830},
  year={2020}
}
@inproceedings{pang2019deep,
  title={Deep rnn framework for visual sequential applications},
  author={Pang, Bo and Zha, Kaiwen and Cao, Hanwen and Shi, Chen and Lu, Cewu},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition},
  pages={423--432},
  year={2019}
}
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Sep 2020 - Present
S.M. in Computer Science
Sep 2020 - May 2022
Cambridge, MA
B.Eng. in Computer Science
Sep 2016 - Jun 2020
Shanghai, China
Experience
Research Assistant | advised by Prof. Dina Katabi
Sep 2020 - Present
Cambridge, MA
Research Intern | hosted by Dr. Xingyi Zhou and Dr. Lu Yuan
May 2025 - Present
Bellevue, WA
Research Intern | hosted by Xiuye Gu, Dr. Alireza Fathi, Dr. David Ross, and Prof. Cordelia Schmid
May 2024 - Jan 2025
Mountain View, CA
Visiting Student | advised by Prof. Aude Oliva and Prof. Bolei Zhou
Jul 2019 - Mar 2020
Cambridge, MA
Research Assistant | advised by Prof. Cewu Lu
Sep 2017 - Jul 2019
Shanghai, China