Zhenmei Shi

Ph.D.

Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison, US

Contact:
zhmeishi [at] cs [dot] wisc [dot] edu
Office 5388, Department of Computer Sciences, UW-Madison

Google Scholar | Github | LinkedIn | CV | OpenReview

About Me

I will join Voyage AI as a Research Scientist, working with Tengyu Ma.

Currently, I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison advised by Yingyu Liang. I obtained my B.S. degree in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics Advanced, from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2019.

I was Research Intern at Google Cloud AI in fall 2024, Sunnyvale, working with Sercan Arik. Last summer, I was an AI Research Scientist Intern at Salesforce, Palo Alto, working with Shafiq Joty. Recently, I was a Research Scientist Intern at Adobe, Seattle, working with Zhao Song.

My research interest mainly focuses on Understanding the learning and adaptation of Foundation Models, including Large Language Models, Vision Language Models, Diffusion Models, Shallow Networks, and so on. Feel free to contact me for collaboration.

Publications

* denotes equal contribution or alphabetical order.

	Discovering the Gems in Early Layers: Accelerating Long-Context LLMs with 1000x Input Token Reduction Zhenmei Shi, Yifei Ming, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yingyu Liang, Shafiq Joty arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ] [ Code ]
	Differential Privacy Mechanisms in Neural Tangent Kernel Regression Jiuxiang Gu, Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* WACV 2025 [ arXiv ]
	Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words? Delving Into Spatial Reasoning for Vision Language Models Jiayu Wang, Yifei Ming, Zhenmei Shi, Vibhav Vineet, Xin Wang, Yixuan Li, Neel Joshi NeurIPS 2024 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Code ] [ Dataset ] [ Poster ]
	Multi-Layer Transformers Gradient Can be Approximated in Almost Linear Time Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou* NeurIPS 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	Tensor Attention Training: Provably Efficient Learning of Higher-order Transformers Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou NeurIPS 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	A Tighter Complexity Analysis of SparseGPT Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song NeurIPS 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	Differential Privacy of Cross-Attention with Provable Guarantee Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou NeurIPS 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	Do Large Language Models Have Compositional Ability? An Investigation into Limitations and Scalability Zhuoyan Xu, Zhenmei Shi, Yingyu Liang COLM 2024 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Workshop ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Poster ]
	Why Larger Language Models Do In-context Learning Differently? Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Zhuoyan Xu, Yingyu Liang ICML 2024 [ Openreview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Workshop ] [ Workshop Poster ]
	Fourier Circuits in Neural Networks and Transformers: A Case Study of Modular Arithmetic with Multiple Inputs Chenyang Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Tianyi Zhou* ICLR 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	Towards Few-Shot Adaptation of Foundation Models via Multitask Finetuning Zhuoyan Xu, Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Fangzhou Mu, Yin Li, Yingyu Liang ICLR 2024 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Poster ] [ Video ] [ Workshop ] [ Workshop Poster ] [ Workshop Slides ]
	Domain Generalization via Nuclear Norm Regularization Zhenmei Shi, Yifei Ming, Ying Fan, Frederic Sala, Yingyu Liang CPAL 2024 Oral* [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Workshop ] [ Workshop Poster ]
	Provable Guarantees for Neural Networks via Gradient Feature Learning Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Yingyu Liang NeurIPS 2023 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Video ] [ Slides ] [ Poster ]
	A Graph-Theoretic Framework for Understanding Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning Yiyou Sun, Zhenmei Shi, Yixuan Li NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Video ] [ Code ] [ Slides ]
	When and How Does Known Class Help Discover Unknown Ones? Provable Understandings Through Spectral Analysis Yiyou Sun, Zhenmei Shi, Yingyu Liang, Yixuan Li ICML 2023 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Video ] [ Code ]
	The Trade-off between Universality and Label Efficiency of Representations from Contrastive Learning Zhenmei Shi, Jiefeng Chen, Kunyang Li, Jayaram Raghuram, Xi Wu, Yingyu Liang, Somesh Jha ICLR 2023 Spotlight (Accept Rate: 7.95%) [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Video ] [ Workshop ] [ Workshop Poster ]
	A Theoretical Analysis on Feature Learning in Neural Networks: Emergence from Inputs and Advantage over Fixed Features Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Yingyu Liang ICLR 2022 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Video ]
	Attentive Walk-Aggregating Graph Neural Networks Mehmet F. Demirel, Shengchao Liu, Siddhant Garg, Zhenmei Shi, Yingyu Liang TMLR 2022 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Code ]
	Deep Online Fused Video Stabilization Zhenmei Shi, Fuhao Shi, Wei-Sheng Lai, Chia-Kai Liang, Yingyu Liang WACV 2022 [ Paper ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Project ] [ Code ] [ Dataset ]
	Structured Feature Learning for End-to-End Continuous Sign Language Recognition Zhaoyang Yang, Zhenmei Shi, Xiaoyong Shen, Yu-Wing Tai arXiv, 2019 [ arXiv ] [ News ]

Preprint

* denotes equal contribution or alphabetical order.

	Curse of Attention: A Kernel-Based Perspective for Why Transformers Fail to Generalize on Time Series Forecasting and Beyond Yekun Ke, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Chiwun Yang* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	The Computational Limits of State-Space Models and Mamba via the Lens of Circuit Complexity Yifang Chen, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	On the Expressive Power of Modern Hopfield Networks Xiaoyu Li, Yuanpeng Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Circuit Complexity Bounds for RoPE-based Transformer Architecture Bo Chen, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Jiangxuan Long, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Bypassing the Exponential Dependency: Looped Transformers Efficiently Learn In-context by Multi-step Gradient Descent Bo Chen, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Beyond Linear Approximations: A Novel Pruning Approach for Attention Matrix Yingyu Liang, Jiangxuan Long, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Advancing the Understanding of Fixed Point Iterations in Deep Neural Networks: A Detailed Analytical Study Yekun Ke, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Looped ReLU MLPs May Be All You Need as Practical Programmable Computers Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Fine-grained Attention I/O Complexity: Comprehensive Analysis for Backward Passes Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	HSR-Enhanced Sparse Attention Acceleration Bo Chen, Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Fast John Ellipsoid Computation with Differential Privacy Optimization Jiuxiang Gu, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Junwei Yu arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Toward Infinite-Long Prefix in Transformer Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Chiwun Yang arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ] [ Code ]
	Unraveling the Smoothness Properties of Diffusion Models: A Gaussian Mixture Perspective Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Conv-Basis: A New Paradigm for Efficient Attention Inference and Gradient Computation in Transformers Yingyu Liang, Heshan Liu, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Zhuoyan Xu, Junze Yin arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Exploring the Frontiers of Softmax: Provable Optimization, Applications in Diffusion Model, and Beyond Jiuxiang Gu, Chenyang Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Dual Augmented Memory Network for Unsupervised Video Object Tracking Zhenmei Shi, Haoyang Fang, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi Keung Tang arXiv, 2019 [ arXiv ] [ Project ]

Technical Projects

	Velocity Vector Preserving Trajectory Simplification Technical Report, 2018 [ Paper ] [ Code ]
	Deep Colorization, 2018. [ News ]

Research & Work Experience

	Research Scientist Voyage AI 2025 - Now \| Tengyu Ma
	Research Assistant University of Wisconsin-Madison 2019 - 2024 \| Yingyu Liang
	Research Intern Google Cloud AI in Sunnyvale, CA Fall 2024 \| Sercan Arik
	AI Research Scientist Intern Salesforce in Palo Alto, CA Summer 2024 \| Shafiq Joty
	Research Scientist Intern Adobe in Seattle, WA Spring 2024 \| Zhao Song
	Software Engineering Intern Google in Mountain View, CA Summer 2021 \| Myra Nam Summer 2020 \| Fuhao Shi
	Research Intern Megvii (Face++) in Beijing Summer 2019 \| Xiangyu Zhang
	Research Intern Tencent YouTu in Shenzhen Winter 2019 \| Zhaoyang Yang and Yu-Wing Tai Winter 2018 \| Xin Tao and Yu-Wing Tai
	Research Assistant Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 2018 - 2019 \| Chi Keung Tang 2017 - 2018 \| Raymond Wong Summer 2016 \| Ji-Shan Hu
	Research Intern Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA Summer 2017 \| Cheng Liu and Kwai L. Wong

Academic Services

Conference Reviewer at ICLR 2022-2025, AIStats 2025, NeurIPS 2022-2024, ICML 2022 and 2024-2025, WACV 2022 and 2025, ICCV 2021-2023, ECCV 2020-2022, CVPR 2021-2022 and 2025
Journal Reviewer at JVCI, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Teaching

Teaching Assistant of CS220 (Data Programming I) at UW-Madison (Spring 2020)
Teaching Assistant of CS301 (Intro to Data Programming) at UW-Madison (Fall 2019) This page has been accessed

times since April 02, 2022
Last updated: Dec 10, 2024

	Discovering the Gems in Early Layers: Accelerating Long-Context LLMs with 1000x Input Token Reduction Zhenmei Shi, Yifei Ming, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yingyu Liang, Shafiq Joty arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ] [ Code ]
	Differential Privacy Mechanisms in Neural Tangent Kernel Regression Jiuxiang Gu, Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* WACV 2025 [ arXiv ]
	Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words? Delving Into Spatial Reasoning for Vision Language Models Jiayu Wang, Yifei Ming, Zhenmei Shi, Vibhav Vineet, Xin Wang, Yixuan Li, Neel Joshi NeurIPS 2024 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Code ] [ Dataset ] [ Poster ]
	Multi-Layer Transformers Gradient Can be Approximated in Almost Linear Time Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou* NeurIPS 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	Tensor Attention Training: Provably Efficient Learning of Higher-order Transformers Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou NeurIPS 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	A Tighter Complexity Analysis of SparseGPT Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song NeurIPS 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	Differential Privacy of Cross-Attention with Provable Guarantee Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou NeurIPS 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	Do Large Language Models Have Compositional Ability? An Investigation into Limitations and Scalability Zhuoyan Xu, Zhenmei Shi, Yingyu Liang COLM 2024 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Workshop ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Poster ]
	Why Larger Language Models Do In-context Learning Differently? Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Zhuoyan Xu, Yingyu Liang ICML 2024 [ Openreview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Workshop ] [ Workshop Poster ]
	Fourier Circuits in Neural Networks and Transformers: A Case Study of Modular Arithmetic with Multiple Inputs Chenyang Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Tianyi Zhou* ICLR 2024 Workshop [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ]
	Towards Few-Shot Adaptation of Foundation Models via Multitask Finetuning Zhuoyan Xu, Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Fangzhou Mu, Yin Li, Yingyu Liang ICLR 2024 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Poster ] [ Video ] [ Workshop ] [ Workshop Poster ] [ Workshop Slides ]
	Domain Generalization via Nuclear Norm Regularization Zhenmei Shi, Yifei Ming, Ying Fan, Frederic Sala, Yingyu Liang CPAL 2024 Oral* [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Workshop ] [ Workshop Poster ]
	Provable Guarantees for Neural Networks via Gradient Feature Learning Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Yingyu Liang NeurIPS 2023 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Video ] [ Slides ] [ Poster ]
	A Graph-Theoretic Framework for Understanding Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning Yiyou Sun, Zhenmei Shi, Yixuan Li NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Video ] [ Code ] [ Slides ]
	When and How Does Known Class Help Discover Unknown Ones? Provable Understandings Through Spectral Analysis Yiyou Sun, Zhenmei Shi, Yingyu Liang, Yixuan Li ICML 2023 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Video ] [ Code ]
	The Trade-off between Universality and Label Efficiency of Representations from Contrastive Learning Zhenmei Shi, Jiefeng Chen, Kunyang Li, Jayaram Raghuram, Xi Wu, Yingyu Liang, Somesh Jha ICLR 2023 Spotlight (Accept Rate: 7.95%) [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Video ] [ Workshop ] [ Workshop Poster ]
	A Theoretical Analysis on Feature Learning in Neural Networks: Emergence from Inputs and Advantage over Fixed Features Zhenmei Shi, Junyi Wei, Yingyu Liang ICLR 2022 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Code ] [ Slides ] [ Video ]
	Attentive Walk-Aggregating Graph Neural Networks Mehmet F. Demirel, Shengchao Liu, Siddhant Garg, Zhenmei Shi, Yingyu Liang TMLR 2022 [ OpenReview ] [ arXiv ] [ Code ]
	Deep Online Fused Video Stabilization Zhenmei Shi, Fuhao Shi, Wei-Sheng Lai, Chia-Kai Liang, Yingyu Liang WACV 2022 [ Paper ] [ arXiv ] [ Poster ] [ Project ] [ Code ] [ Dataset ]
	Structured Feature Learning for End-to-End Continuous Sign Language Recognition Zhaoyang Yang, Zhenmei Shi, Xiaoyong Shen, Yu-Wing Tai arXiv, 2019 [ arXiv ] [ News ]

	Curse of Attention: A Kernel-Based Perspective for Why Transformers Fail to Generalize on Time Series Forecasting and Beyond Yekun Ke, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Chiwun Yang* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	The Computational Limits of State-Space Models and Mamba via the Lens of Circuit Complexity Yifang Chen, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	On the Expressive Power of Modern Hopfield Networks Xiaoyu Li, Yuanpeng Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Circuit Complexity Bounds for RoPE-based Transformer Architecture Bo Chen, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Jiangxuan Long, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Bypassing the Exponential Dependency: Looped Transformers Efficiently Learn In-context by Multi-step Gradient Descent Bo Chen, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Beyond Linear Approximations: A Novel Pruning Approach for Attention Matrix Yingyu Liang, Jiangxuan Long, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Advancing the Understanding of Fixed Point Iterations in Deep Neural Networks: A Detailed Analytical Study Yekun Ke, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Looped ReLU MLPs May Be All You Need as Practical Programmable Computers Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Fine-grained Attention I/O Complexity: Comprehensive Analysis for Backward Passes Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	HSR-Enhanced Sparse Attention Acceleration Bo Chen, Yingyu Liang, Zhizhou Sha, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Fast John Ellipsoid Computation with Differential Privacy Optimization Jiuxiang Gu, Xiaoyu Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Junwei Yu arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Toward Infinite-Long Prefix in Transformer Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Chiwun Yang arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ] [ Code ]
	Unraveling the Smoothness Properties of Diffusion Models: A Gaussian Mixture Perspective Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Yufa Zhou arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Conv-Basis: A New Paradigm for Efficient Attention Inference and Gradient Computation in Transformers Yingyu Liang, Heshan Liu, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song, Zhuoyan Xu, Junze Yin arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Exploring the Frontiers of Softmax: Provable Optimization, Applications in Diffusion Model, and Beyond Jiuxiang Gu, Chenyang Li, Yingyu Liang, Zhenmei Shi, Zhao Song* arXiv, 2024 [ arXiv ]
	Dual Augmented Memory Network for Unsupervised Video Object Tracking Zhenmei Shi, Haoyang Fang, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi Keung Tang arXiv, 2019 [ arXiv ] [ Project ]

	Research Scientist Voyage AI 2025 - Now \| Tengyu Ma
	Research Assistant University of Wisconsin-Madison 2019 - 2024 \| Yingyu Liang
	Research Intern Google Cloud AI in Sunnyvale, CA Fall 2024 \| Sercan Arik
	AI Research Scientist Intern Salesforce in Palo Alto, CA Summer 2024 \| Shafiq Joty
	Research Scientist Intern Adobe in Seattle, WA Spring 2024 \| Zhao Song
	Software Engineering Intern Google in Mountain View, CA Summer 2021 \| Myra Nam Summer 2020 \| Fuhao Shi
	Research Intern Megvii (Face++) in Beijing Summer 2019 \| Xiangyu Zhang
	Research Intern Tencent YouTu in Shenzhen Winter 2019 \| Zhaoyang Yang and Yu-Wing Tai Winter 2018 \| Xin Tao and Yu-Wing Tai
	Research Assistant Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 2018 - 2019 \| Chi Keung Tang 2017 - 2018 \| Raymond Wong Summer 2016 \| Ji-Shan Hu
	Research Intern Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA Summer 2017 \| Cheng Liu and Kwai L. Wong