Zichen Tian (Jason)
PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence at Singapore Management University (SMU CVML Lab, advised by Prof. Qianru Sun). Previously research associate at S-Lab, Nanyang Technological University, and at Tsinghua University.
I study how foundation models acquire new knowledge from scarce data, and how to predict adaptation failures before training. In synthetic aperture radar (SAR), multispectral and medical imaging, data lie far from the pretraining distribution and labels are few and long-tailed, so the pretrained prior is indispensable yet mismatched. I treat adaptation as subspace allocation: deciding, from the pretrained weights and target data, where and along which directions an update should act, reusing transferable structure rather than disrupting it. This line of work includes debLoRA (NeurIPS 2024), MetaPEFT (CVPR 2025 Highlight) and mtLoRA (ICLR 2026). Methods: parameter-efficient fine-tuning (LoRA, PEFT), long-tailed and multi-task adaptation. Applications so far: SAR and multispectral remote-sensing imagery.
Honors
- Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning and ML Foundations, 2026
- SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellowship 2026 and 2025
- SMU SCIS Dean's List 2026 and 2025
- CVPR 2025 Highlight (top 3% of submissions)
Selected Publications
- Scalable Multi-Task Low-Rank Model Adaptation (mtLoRA). Zichen Tian, Antoine Ledent, Qianru Sun. ICLR 2026. Scales multi-task LoRA to 15-25 tasks with Spectral-Aware Regularization, Block-Level Adaptation and Fine-Grained Routing.
- Meta-Learning Hyperparameters for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (MetaPEFT / MetaLoRA). Zichen Tian, Yaoyao Liu, Qianru Sun. CVPR 2025 Highlight. Meta-learns PEFT module insertion, layer selection and module-wise learning rates for long-tailed remote-sensing adaptation.
- Learning De-Biased Representations for Remote-Sensing Imagery (debLoRA). Zichen Tian, Zhaozheng Chen, Qianru Sun. NeurIPS 2024. Unsupervised, LoRA-agnostic de-biasing of long-tailed remote-sensing features.
Profiles: ORCID · Google Scholar · Semantic Scholar · OpenAlex · DBLP · Hugging Face · ResearchGate · GitHub