Zhe Li 李哲

Associate Professor

School of Information Science and Technology and Artificial Intelligence
Nanjing Forestry University

Email: zheli@njfu.edu.cn

Biography

I am currently an Associate Professor at Nanjing Forestry University, affiliated with the Multimedia Perception and Computer Vision Research Group led by Prof. Jinhui Tang. I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2025, advised by Prof. Yongdong Zhang (IEEE Fellow) and Prof. Zhendong Mao. From 2019 to 2021, I studied at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), under the supervision of Prof. Jie Tian (IEEE Fellow) and Prof. Shuo Wang. Before that, I obtained my B.S. degree from Shandong University (SDU) in 2019.

My research interests include Multimodal AI and Computer Vision, with a focus on multimodal retrieval, multimodal LLMs, and generative AI.

Join Us

I am seeking highly self-motivated Master students (MSC) and Research Assistants (RA, 欢迎具备一定编程基础的本科生加入实验室，参与多模态学习相关研究，发表高水平论文) in AI.
The current research interests include, but are not limited to:

Vision-and-Language Understanding
Multimodal Retrieval
Multimodal Large Language Models
Computer Vision
AI Safety and Interpretability

If you’re interested, please feel free to contact me via email (zheli@njfu.edu.cn) with your CV. [英雄不问出处]

News

2025.07, Our survey about the composed image retrieval is now available on arXiv and is undergoing final revisions.
2025.06, One paper was accepted to ICCV 2025.
2025.04, One paper was accepted to SIGIR 2025.
2025.02, One paper was accepted to CVPR 2025.
2024.02, Two papers were accepted to IEEE TCSVT.
2023.08, One paper was accepted to IEEE TCSVT.
2023.01, One paper was accepted to Nature Nanotechnology.
2022.04, One paper was accepted to IEEE TETCI.
2020.08, I went to the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing for a research visit.

Selected Publications

Kun Zhang, Jingyu Li, Zhe Li, Jingjing Zhang, Fan Li, Yandong Liu, Rui Yan, Zihang Jiang, Nan Chen, Lei Zhang, Yongdong Zhang, Zhendong Mao, S Kevin Zhou

Composed Multi-modal Retrieval: A Survey of Approaches and Applications

Preprint, 2025.
Zhe Li, Lei Zhang, Zheren Fu, Kun Zhang, Zhendong Mao

Hierarchy-Aware Pseudo Word Learning with Text Adaptation for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval

International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.
Zhe Li, Lei Zhang, Kun Zhang, Weidong Chen, Yongdong Zhang, Zhendong Mao

Rethinking Pseudo Word Learning in Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval: From an Object-Aware Perspective

International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2025.
Kun Zhang, Jingyu Li, Zhe Li, S. Kevin Zhou

DH-Set: Improving Vision-Language Alignment with Diverse and Hybrid Set-Embeddings Learning

IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.
Zhe Li, Lei Zhang, Kun Zhang, Yongdong Zhang, Zhendong Mao

Improving image-text matching with bidirectional consistency of cross-modal alignment

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2024.
Zhe Li, Lei Zhang, Kun Zhang, Yongdong Zhang, Zhendong Mao

Fast, accurate, and lightweight memory-enhanced embedding learning framework for image-text retrieval

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2024.
Kun Zhang, Bo Hu, Huatian Zhang, Zhe Li, Zhendong Mao

Enhanced semantic similarity learning framework for image-text matching

IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2023.
Mingsheng Zhu, Jie Zhuang, Zhe Li, Qiqi Liu, Rongping Zhao, Zhanxia Gao, Adam C Midgley, Tianyi Qi, Jingwei Tian, Zhixuan Zhang, Deling Kong, Jie Tian, Xiyun Yan, Xinglu Huang

Machine-learning-assisted single-vessel analysis of nanoparticle permeability in tumour vasculatures

Nature Nanotechnology, 2023.
Zhe Li, Shuo Wang, He Yu, Yongbei Zhu, Qingxia Wu, Liusu Wang, Zhangjie Wu, Yuncui Gan, Weimin Li, Bensheng Qiu, Jie Tian

A novel deep learning framework based mask-guided attention mechanism for distant metastasis prediction of lung cancer

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (TETCI), 2022.

Honors and Awards

2025.04, Outstanding PhD Graduate of USTC
2024.09, USTC-Anheng Doctoral Scholarship
2019/20/21/23, First-class Academic Scholarship of USTC
2019.04, Outstanding BS Graduate of SDU
2022.09, Huawei Cloud Marine Data AI Competition-Second Prize (Prize: ¥100,000)
2021.05, National Underwater Robotics Competition-Second Prize (Prize: ¥30,000)
2020.05, National Underwater Robotics Competition-Third Prize (Prize: ¥20,000)
2020.07, Hualu Cup SEED Jiangsu Big Data Competition (Prize: ¥5,000)

Educations

2019.09 - 2025.06, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)
PhD in Artificial Intelligence Advisor: Prof. Yongdong Zhang and Prof. Zhendong Mao
2015.09 - 2019.06, Shandong University (SDU)
Bachelor in Electronic Information Engineering

Academic Services

Conference Reviewer

CVPR 2023, 2024, 2025
ICCV 2023, 2025
NIPS 2023, 2024
AAAI 2023, 2024, 2025
WWW 2025

Journal Reviewer

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP)
IEEE Transactions on Neural Network and Learning System (T-NNLS)
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (T-CSVT)
IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence (T-ETCI)