Hailiang ZHAO

Biography

I am a ZJU 100 Young Professor (平台“百人计划”研究员) in the School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University (ZJU). I obtained my PhD from the College of Computer Science and Technology at ZJU in June 2024, supervised by Prof. Shuiguang Deng. From September 2022 to September 2023, I was a visiting PhD student at the PDCL Lab, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), under the supervision of Prof. Xueyan Tang.

通知：

• 课题组目前招收助理教授（含博士后） 1 名，有兴趣的人士请我与取得联系。
• 本人面向 2027 年招生有一个博士名额。其中，直博生今年 8 月左右开始报名（推免生），春季硕转博和普博今年 10 月报名，秋季硕转博明年 4 月报名，报考要求请参考《浙江大学软件学院 2026 年博士研究生招生简章》，有意向在我处攻读博士学位的同学，请与我取得联系。

[Google Scholar] [ResearchGate] [ZJU Homepage] [CV]

Research Interests (Selected)

My research centers on performance optimization for intelligent computing systems, aiming to enable efficient, reliable, and sustainable intelligent services in the era of large models.

• Robust and Efficient Runtime Optimization for Generative AI Models. To address bottlenecks in KV cache management, model compression, and SLO-aware scheduling for large language and diffusion models, I develop learning-augmented and semantics-aware runtime techniques with theoretical guarantees and practical robustness. Representative work includes PFSUM (NeurIPS '24) and Guard (NeurIPS '25) for adaptive caching with optimal consistency-robustness trade-offs, RPB (ICML '26 Spotlight) for online caching under non-stationarity, SegQuant (CVPR '26) for semantics-aware diffusion model quantization, and LCR for robust ML-based GPU caching in inference workloads. A general architecture for Learning-Augmented Systems has also been proposed to guide principled deployment across heterogeneous hardware.

• Intelligent Resource Scheduling and Service Coordination in Cloud-Edge Platforms. Targeting resource heterogeneity, dynamic workloads, and service complexity in distributed cloud-edge environments, I design scheduling frameworks and coordination mechanisms that jointly optimize performance, reliability, and efficiency. Key contributions include Morphis for SLO-aware microservice scheduling via structural fingerprinting of call graphs, PeerSync (TSC '25) for edge-optimized container image distribution outperforming state-of-the-art open-source systems, CATScaler (TSC '25) for cloud-native auto-scaling, and foundational algorithms published in TPDS/TMC/TSC, including the ICWS '19 Best Student Paper. This pillar also encompasses microservice incident management (ARMOR, ASE '26), unified system representations for tail latency prediction (USRFNet, MSGAF) and the emerging vision of Agentic Services Computing, which reimagines service platforms as agent-centric ecosystems where autonomous agents perceive, reason, and coordinate toward collective goals.

• Trusted Data-Service-Knowledge Governance for Industrial Intelligence. Extending system-level optimization into vertical industrial domains, I investigate how to unify heterogeneous data, services, and domain knowledge into coherent, trustworthy intelligence for Industry 5.0. The flagship outcome is Trisk, a holistic governance framework bridging sensor streams, service architectures, and expert knowledge. Complementing this are multimodal perception methods such as OmniFuser for predictive maintenance, CADRef (CVPR '25) for class-aware OOD detection, and TrackTeller for vehicular 3D grounding.

If you are interested in my research and would like to pursue a Master's or Ph.D. under my supervision, please feel free to send an email to: hliangzhao {AT} zju {DOT} edu {DOT} cn.

Selected Papers

• Wenzhuo Qian, Hailiang Zhao^*, Ziqi Wang, Zhipeng Gao, Jiayi Chen, Zhiwei Ling, and Shuiguang Deng^*, Missing-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Unified Microservice Incident Management. To be proceeded in the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE '26).

• Peng Chen, Hailiang Zhao^*, Xueyan Tang, Yixuan Wang, Shuiguang Deng^*, Towards Optimal Robustness in Learning-Augmented Paging. To be proceeded in the 43th International Conference on Machine Learning 2026 (ICML '26). (Spotlight)

• Jiaji Zhang, Hailiang Zhao^*, Guoxuan Zhu, Ruichao Sun, Jiaju Wu, Xinkui Zhao, Hanlin Tang, Weiyi Lu, Kan Liu, Tao Lan, Lin Qu, and Shuiguang Deng^*, Shiva-DiT: Residual-Based Differentiable Top-k Selection for Efficient Diffusion Transformers. In: arXiv preprints.

• Zhiwei Ling, Hailiang Zhao^*, Chao Zhang, Xiang Ao, Ziqi Wang, Cheng Zhang, Zhen Qin, Xinkui Zhao, Kingsum Chow^*, Yuanqing Wu, and MengChu Zhou, Adaptive Dual-Weighting Framework for Federated Learning via Out-of-Distribution Detection. In: arXiv preprints.

• Yu Tang^†, Hailiang Zhao^†*, Chuansheng Lu, Yifei Zhang, Kingsum Chow^*, and Shuiguang Deng, and Rui Shi, Morphis: SLO-Aware Resource Scheduling for Microservices with Time-Varying Call Graphs. In: arXiv preprints.

• Hailiang Zhao, Ziqi Wang, Daojiang Hu, Zhiwei Ling, Wenzhuo Qian, Jiahui Zhai, Yuhao Yang, Zhipeng Gao, Mingyi Liu, Kai Di, Xinkui Zhao, Zhongjie Wang, Jianwei Yin, MengChu Zhou, and Shuiguang Deng, Industrial Data-Service-Knowledge Governance: Toward Integrated and Trusted Intelligence for Industry 5.0. In: arXiv preprints.

• Jiahong Yu^†, Ziqi Wang^†, Hailiang Zhao^*, Wei Zhai, Xueqiang Yan, and Shuiguang Deng, TrackTeller: Temporal Multimodal 3D Grounding for Behavior-Dependent Object References. In: arXiv preprints.

• Ziqi Wang, Hailiang Zhao^*, Yuhao Yang, Daojiang Hu, Cheng Bao, Mingyi Liu, Kai Di, Schahram Dustdar, Zhongjie Wang, and Shuiguang Deng, OmniFuser: Adaptive Multimodal Fusion for Service-Oriented Predictive Maintenance. In: arXiv preprints.

• Shuiguang Deng^*, Hailiang Zhao^*, Ziqi Wang, Guanjie Cheng, Peng Chen, Wenzhuo Qian, Zhiwei Ling, Jianwei Yin, Albert Y. Zomaya, and Schahram Dustdar, Agentic Services Computing. In: arXiv preprints.

• Peng Chen, Jiaji Zhang, Hailiang Zhao^*, Yirong Zhang, Jiahong Yu, Xueyan Tang, Yixuan Wang, Hao Li, Jianping Zou, Gang Xiong, Kingsum Chow, Shuibing He, Shuiguang Deng^*, Toward Robust and Efficient ML-Based GPU Caching for Modern Inference. In: arXiv preprints.

• Ziqi Wang, Hailiang Zhao^*, Cheng Bao, Wenzhuo Qian, Yuhao Yang, Xueqiang Sun, and Shuiguang Deng^*, XFMNet: Decoding Cross-Site and Nonstationary Water Patterns via Stepwise Multimodal Fusion for Long-Term Water Quality Forecasting. In: arXiv preprints.

• Wenzhuo Qian, Hailiang Zhao^*, Tianlv Chen, Jiayi Chen, Ziqi Wang, Kingsum Chow, and Shuiguang Deng^*, Learning Unified System Representations for Microservice Tail Latency Prediction. In: arXiv preprints.

• Jiaji Zhang, Ruichao Sun, Hailiang Zhao^*, Jiaju Wu, Peng Chen, Hao Li, Yuying Liu, Kingsum Chow, Gang Xiong, and Shuiguang Deng^*, SegQuant: A Semantics-Aware and Generalizable Quantization Framework for Diffusion Models. To be proceeded in the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026 (CVPR '26). [Code] (AcademicDaily 推文)

• Yinuo Deng^†, Hailiang Zhao^†*, Dongjing Wang, Peng Chen, Wenzhuo Qian, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Shuiguang Deng^*, PeerSync: Accelerating Containerized Model Inference at the Network Edge. In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), early access, doi: 10.1109/TSC.2025.3648591.

• Peng Chen, Hailiang Zhao^*, Jiaji Zhang, Xueyan Tang, Yixuan Wang, and Shuiguang Deng^*, Robustifying Learning-Augmented Caching Efficiently without Compromising 1-Consistency. In: Proceedings of the 39th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS '25). [Poster]

• Hailiang Zhao, Xueyan Tang^*, Peng Chen, Jianwei Yin, and Shuiguang Deng, Data-Locality-Aware Task Assignment and Scheduling for Distributed Job Executions. In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), early access, doi: 10.1109/TSC.2025.3594158. [Code]

• Hailiang Zhao, Ziqi Wang, Guanjie Cheng^*, Wenzhuo Qian, Peng Chen, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Shuiguang Deng^*, Online Workload Scheduling for Social Welfare Maximization in the Computing Continuum. In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), early access, doi: 10.1109/TSC.2025.3570845.

• Fan'an Meng, Hongjun Dai^*, Guoqing Cong, Bo Zhu, and Hailiang Zhao, CATScaler: A Convolution-Augmented Transformer Scaling Framework for Cloud-Native Applications. In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), early access, doi: 10.1109/TSC.2025.3592383.

• Cheng Zhang, Yinuo Deng, Hailiang Zhao^*, Tianlv Chen, and Shuiguang Deng^*, Tail-Learning: Adaptive Learning Method for Mitigating Tail Latency in Autonomous Edge Systems. In: ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS), early access, doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3737289.

• Zhiwei Ling, Yachen Chang, Hailiang Zhao^*, Xinkui Zhao, Kingsum Chow^*, and Shuiguang Deng, CADRef: Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection via Class-Aware Decoupled Relative Feature Leveraging. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025 (CVPR '25). [Code] [Poster]

• Hailiang Zhao, Xueyan Tang, Peng Chen, and Shuiguang Deng, Learning-Augmented Algorithms for the Bahncard Problem. In: Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS '24). [Code] [Slide] [Poster]

• Shuiguang Deng^*, Hailiang Zhao^*, Bingbing Huang, Cheng Zhang, Feiyi Chen, Yinuo Deng, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Albert Y. Zomaya, Cloud-Native Computing: A Survey from the Perspective of Services. In: Proceedings of the IEEE (JPROC), vol. 112, no. 1, pp. 12-46, Jan. 2024, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2024.3353855. (Cover Paper, 2024-2025 IF = 25.9)

• Hailiang Zhao, Shuiguang Deng^*, Zhengzhe Xiang, Xueqiang Yan, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Albert Y Zomaya, Scheduling Multi-Server Jobs with Sublinear Regrets via Online Learning. In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 1168-1180, May-June 2024, doi: 10.1109/TSC.2023.3303344.

• Hailiang Zhao, Shuiguang Deng^*, Feiyi Chen, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Albert Y. Zomaya, Learning to Schedule Multi-Server Jobs with Fluctuated Processing Speeds. In: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 234-245, 1 Jan. 2023, doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2022.3215947. [Slide]

• Shuiguang Deng, Hailiang Zhao, Zhengzhe Xiang, Cheng Zhang, Rong Jiang, Ying Li^*, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Albert Y. Zomaya, Dependent Function Embedding for Distributed Serverless Edge Computing. In: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), vol. 33, no. 10, pp. 2346-2357, October 2022, doi: 10.1109/TPDS.2021.3137380.

• Hailiang Zhao, Shuiguang Deng^*, Zijie Liu, Zhengzhe Xiang, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Albert Y. Zomaya, DPoS: Decentralized, Privacy-Preserving, and Low-Complexity Online Slicing for Multi-Tenant Networks. In: IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), vol. 21, no. 12, pp. 4296-4309, 1 Dec. 2022, doi: 10.1109/TMC.2021.3074934. (2021 Trending Paper) [Slide]

• Hailiang Zhao, Shuiguang Deng^*, Zijie Liu, Jianwei Yin, and Schahram Dustdar, Distributed Redundant Placement for Microservice-based Applications at the Edge. In: IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (TSC), vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 1732-1745, 1 May-June 2022, doi: 10.1109/TSC.2020.3013600. [Slide] (ESI Highly Cited Paper)

• Shuiguang Deng, Hailiang Zhao, Weijia Fang^*, Jianwei Yin, Schahram Dustdar, and Albert Y. Zomaya, Edge Intelligence: The Confluence of Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence. In: IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoTJ), vol. 7, no. 8, pp. 7457-7469, Aug. 2020, doi: 10.1109/JIOT.2020.2984887. (Sep 2020 Popular Paper, ESI Hot Paper, ESI Highly Cited Paper, 21k+ full text read on IEEE Explore, Ranked No. 1 in paper readership at ZJU on ResearchGate in 2020)

• Hailiang Zhao, Shuiguang Deng^*, Cheng Zhang, Wei Du, Qiang He, and Jianwei Yin, A Mobility-aware Cross-edge Computation Offloading Framework for Partitionable Applications. In: Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS '19), Milan, Italy, 2019. [Slide] [Theoretical Analysis] (Best Student Paper)

Selected Projects

• 全要素互联结构自适应的多模态数据治理技术体系，国家重点研发计划课题，主持 (2024-2027)
• 基于软硬件协同的服务调度与资源管理优化方法研究，国家自然科学基金青年科学基金项目（C类），主持 (2026-2028)
• 面向生成式 AI 的异构硬件资源优化与计算加速理论与方法，浙江省科技厅自然科学基金重大项目，参与 (2025-2027)
• 心脑血管疾病诊治关键理论及创新技术研究-基于EMAT的心衰数字化管理和无创诊治新技术研究，浙江省“尖兵领雁+X”科技计划项目，参与 (2025-2026)
• 快手推理场景下典型 GPU 服务的吞吐量提高，快手技术合作项目，主持 (2024-2025)
• 基于人工智能视觉算法的颅神经健康评估，北京医智未来技术合作项目，主持 (2026-2028)
• 鲲鹏通用计算性能调优研究技术合作项目，华为技术合作项目，参与 (2024-2025)
• 面向异构集群的微服务性能分析与资源调度，字节跳动技术合作项目，参与 (2025-2026)
• 6G 网络数据面性能建模与评估项目（二期），华为技术合作项目，参与 (2025-2028)

Selected Awards & Honors

• 华为技术有限公司“火花奖”（接榜难题：面向一体机内多推理实例混部负载的性能预测和调度） (2026)
• 2024 年浙江省优秀博士学位论文提名 (2026)
• 2025 SICI 最佳论文奖 (2025)
• 数据要素赋能新型工业化大赛决赛二等奖 (2025)
• CCF 中国服务计算创新大赛暨深信服杯算法竞赛决赛二等奖（指导学生获奖） (2025)
• CCF 服务计算专委博士学位论文激励计划 (2025)
• 浙江大学启真优秀青年学者 (2024)
• 浙江大学优秀博士学位论文 (2024)
• 浙江大学博新奖学金 (2019)
• 2019 IEEE ICWS 最佳学生论文奖 (2019)
• 武汉理工大学卓越奖学金 (校最高学生奖励) (2018)

Professional Services

I am serving as chair, program chair member and reviewer for several conferences/workshops/forums and journals.

• 计算机工程与科学, 青年编委
• NeurIPS '26, IJCAI-ECAI '26, PAKDD '26, AAAI '26, IJCAI '25, ECAI '25, etc., PC member & reviewer; SMC '26, ICML '26, ECCV '26, CVPR '26, NeurIPS '25, CVPR '25, etc., reviewer
• TC, TMC, TSC, 计算机学报, FGCS, TKDD, Scientific Reports, TGCN, IoTJ, MONET, etc., reviewer

Some Research Materials & Resources

• Understanding Acceleration Opportunities for Microservice Overheads at Hyperscale (Jun 2024)
• Characterizing Microservice Dependency and Performance: Alibaba Trace Analysis (May 2024)
• Online Interval Scheduling (Mar 2024)
• Transformation Techniques in Optimization (Feb 2024)
• Everything about ADMM (Nov 2022)
• Distributed Systems in One Slide (Oct 2022)
• ADMM: The Variational Inequality Perspective (Oct 2022)
• An Overview of Kubernetes Scheduling (Oct 2022)
• 优化算法复杂度分析 (Oct 2022)
• 最优化理论基础 (Jul 2021)
• Park: An Open Platform for Learning-Augmented Computer Systems (Jan 2021)
• 理解共轭梯度法 (Jul 2020)
• 需要熟练掌握的算法理论基础 (May 2020)
• How Should I Slice My Network? (Dec 2019)
• 李雅普诺夫优化导论 (Nov 2018)

Correspondence

Emails: hliangzhao {AT} ZJU {DOT} edu {DOT} cn, hliangzhao97 {AT} gmail {DOT} com

Address:

• Room 3#403, Ningbo Campus of Zhejiang University (浙江省宁波市鄞州区学府路 5 号, 浙江大学宁波国际科创中心 (宁波校区) 315100)
• Room 422, Cao Guangbiao Sci-tech Building, Yuquan Campus of Zhejiang University (中国浙江省杭州市西湖区浙大路 38 号，浙江大学玉泉校区 310027)