Huzheng Yang

CS PhD Student • University of Pennsylvania

Huzheng Yang

I am a CS PhD student (2022-) at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Jianbo Shi and James C. Gee.

My research focuses on understanding and improving multimodal foundation models:

  • Understand: Mechanistic analysis of VLM/LLM representations, brain-guided understanding of model representations. (CVPR 2024, Algonauts 2023, Algonauts 2021)
  • Improve: Generative model's creativity and reasoning capabilities (CVPR 2026), transformer attention layers' inference efficiency (arXiv).

I also build open-source tools, including ncut-pytorch for fast spectral embedding.

Open-source Packages

ncut-pytorch

Nyström Normalized Cuts PyTorch

Normalized Cut with Nyström approximation, run on million-scale graph in milliseconds. O(n) time complexity, O(1) space complexity.

Selected Publications

Vibe Spaces

Vibe Spaces for Creatively Connecting and Expressing Visual Concepts

Huzheng Yang, Katherine Xu, Andrew Lu, Michael D. Grossberg, Yutong Bai, Jianbo Shi

CVPR 2026

Artifacts and attention sinks

Artifacts and attention sinks: Structured approximations for efficient vision transformers

Andrew Lu, Wentinn Liao, Liuhui Wang, Huzheng Yang, Jianbo Shi

arXiv

AlignedCut

AlignedCut: Visual Concepts Discovery on Brain-Guided Universal Feature Space

Huzheng Yang, James Gee*, Jianbo Shi*

arXiv

Brain Decodes Deep Nets

Brain Decodes Deep Nets

Huzheng Yang, James Gee*, Jianbo Shi*

CVPR 2024 ✨Highlight, 2.8% acceptance rate

Memory Encoding Model

Memory Encoding Model

Huzheng Yang, James Gee*, Jianbo Shi*

arXiv ✨Algonauts 2023, competition winner

Upgrading Voxel-wise Encoding Model

Upgrading Voxel-wise Encoding Model via Integrated Integration over Features and Brain Networks

Yuanning Li*, Huzheng Yang*, Shi Gu

Science Bulletin 2022 ✨Algonauts 2021, competition winner

Services

  • Teaching Assistant: CIS 6800 Advanced Topics in Machine Perception (Fall 2023, Fall 2024)

Misc

maimai DX