Qiankun Zhang 张乾坤

I am currently an Associate Professor at the School of Cyber Science and Engineering (CSE) at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST). Prior to joining HUST, I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 2021, under the supervision of Zhiyi Huang, where I received the Lee Shau Kee Postgraduate Fellowship and the Y S & Christabel Lung Postgraduate Scholarship. Before that, I obtained my B.E. from the Chu Kochen Honors College at Zhejiang University (ZJU) in 2017, where I was awarded the Dean's Scholarship. I have also been selected for Overseas High-level Talents in Hubei Province, Wuhan Young Talents, East Lake Young Talents, and the CCF-DiDi GAIA Scholars program.

Research Interests

  • Theoretical Computer Science (TCS): with a particular emphasis on the design and analysis of algorithms with provable theoretical guarantees;
  • Trustworthy Machine Learning (TrustworthyML): focusing on the explainability, fairness, and privacy of machine learning methods;
  • My Recent InterestsAI4TCS: exploring the potential of AI-enhanced approaches to advance our understanding and solution of combinatorial optimization problems.

Recent News

Jun 2025
I was selected for CCF-DiDi GAIA Scholars program. Great thanks to CCF and DiDi!
May 2025
Two papers were accepted to ICML 2025:
▶ "Understanding the unfairness in network quantization" with Bing Liu, Wenjun Miao, Boyu Zhang, Bin Yuan, Jing Wang, Shenghao Liu, and Xianjun Deng;
▶ "DiMa: understanding the hardness of online matching problems via diffusion models" with Boyu Zhang, Aocheng Shen, Bing Liu, Bin Yuan, Jing Wang, Shenghao Liu, and Xianjun Deng.
Apr 2025
One paper was accepted to PVLDB 2025. "PipeTGL: (near) zero bubble memory-based temporal graph neural network training via pipeline optimization" with Jun Liu, Bingqian Du, Ziyue Luo, Sitian Lu, and Hai Jin.
Jul 2024
One paper was accepted to CCS 2024. "Membership inference attacks against vision transformers: mosaic MixUp training to the defense" with Boyu Zhang, Di Yuan, Bin Yuan, and Bingqian Du.
May 2024
One paper was accepted to ICML 2024 (Oral) "Online matching with stochastic rewards: provable better bound via adversarial reinforcement learning" with Aocheng Shen, Boyu Zhang, Hanrui Jiang, Bingqian Du.
Apr 2024
Two papers were accepted to SICOMP:
▶ "AdWords in a panorama" with Zhiyi Huang and Yuhao Zhang;
▶ "Online primal dual meets online matching with stochastic rewards: configuration LP to the rescue" with Zhiyi Huang.
Recruiting Students! I regularly have 1 Ph.D. position and 3 M.S. positions available each year. If you are interested in working with me, please feel free to email me with your CV. Undergraduate research interns are also welcome.