Professor Hengshuang ZHAO is awarded the Excellent Young Scientists Fund by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, under the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) for 2024, with the project on “Intelligent Visual Understanding and Reasoning”.
 
Prof. Zhao’s general research interests cover the broad areas of computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, with special emphasis on building intelligent visual systems. His research goal is to utilise artificial intelligence techniques to make machines perceive, understand, imagine, and interact with the surrounding environment, and ultimately make high positive impacts on various fields. He has developed various advanced intelligence visual understanding algorithms for accurate, efficient, general, and robust visual scene understanding like images, videos, point clouds, etc. The proposed project plans to work on intelligent visual reasoning, via constructing powerful vision foundation models to address the issue of complex and limited versatility of visual data and tasks, via developing innovative representation learning algorithms to solve the problem of weak multi-modal information fusion learning capabilities, via designing cutting-edge visual reasoning frameworks to handle the challenge of the scarcity of visual common sense reasoning knowledge, and ultimately unifies intelligent visual understanding and reasoning.