Hongjue Zhao

PhD Student in Computer Science at UIUC.

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Hello there! I am Hongjue Zhao (赵泓珏), a second-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), under the supervision of Prof. Tarek Abdelzaher. I received my Bachelor’s degree in Automation from Zhejiang University, where I was affiliated with Chu Kochen Honor College and College of Control Science and Engineering.

My research interests lie in physics-informed machine learning for cyber-physical systems. Specifically, I aim to integrate AI with control theory to enhance the performance, robustness, and reliability of AI algorithms across various applications. Currently I am focusing on latent world models for cyber-physical systems.

News

May 13, 2026 I am recognized as a Gold Reviewer for ICML 2026!
Apr 30, 2026 Our papers WestWorld and Dywave are accepted by ICML 2026, and WestWorld receives a Spotlight distinction. Congratulations to Yuchen and Tommy!
Mar 01, 2026 Our papers WestWorld is accepted by ICLR 2026 Workshop World Models.Congratulations to Yuchen!
Jan 26, 2026 Our paper ODESteer is accepted by ICLR 2026!
Sep 18, 2025 Our paper AdaTS is accepted by NeurIPS 2025. Congratulations to Deniz!

Selected Publications

  1. ICML 2026
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    WestWorld: A Knowledge-Encoded Scalable Trajectory World Model for Diverse Robotic Systems
    Yuchen Wang, Jiangtao Kong, Sizhe Wei, Xiaochang Li, Haohong Lin, Hongjue Zhao, Tianyi Zhou, Lu Gan, and Huajie Shao
    Spotlight arXiv Paper Code Website
  2. ICLR 2026
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    ODESteer: A Unified ODE-Based Steering Framework for LLM Alignment
    Hongjue Zhao, Haosen Sun, Jiangtao Kong, Xiaochang Li, Qineng Wang, Liwei Jiang, Qi Zhu, Tarek Abdelzaher, Yejin Choi, Manling Li, and Huajie Shao
    arXiv Paper Code Website
  3. KDD 2024
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    CAT: Interpretable concept-based taylor additive models
    Viet Duong, Qiong Wu, Zhengyi Zhou, Hongjue Zhao, Chenxiang Luo, Eric Zavesky, Huaxiu Yao, and Huajie Shao
    Best Paper arXiv Paper Code
  4. ICLR 2025
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    Accelerating Neural ODEs: A Variational Formulation-based Approach
    Hongjue Zhao, Yuchen Wang, Hairong Qi, Zijie Huang, Han Zhao, Lui Sha, and Huajie Shao
    Paper Code
  5. ICML 2025
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    A Generalizable Physics-Enhanced State Space Model for Long-Term Dynamics Forecasting in Complex Environments
    Yuchen Wang, Hongjue Zhao, Haohong Lin, Enze Xu, Lifang He, and Huajie Shao
    arXiv Paper Code

Awards

2026 Gold Reviewer for ICML 2026
2026 ICML Spotlight Paper Award (WestWorld)
2025 DCoSS-IoT Best Paper Award (RestoreML)
2024 ACM SIGKDD Best Paper Award (CAT)