Prof Xiaojun Chang is a Chair Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), a National High-Level Talent, and a Distinguished Overseas Talent of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is also the recipient of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA).
Prof Chang leads research at the intersection of Embodied Artificial Intelligence, Multimodal Foundation Models, and Brain-Inspired Intelligence. His work focuses on developing intelligent systems that can perceive, reason, learn, and act autonomously in complex real-world environments. By integrating multimodal perception, large-scale reasoning, memory, and decision-making, his research aims to advance the next generation of general-purpose intelligent agents.
Prior to joining USTC, Prof Chang held academic positions at Monash University, RMIT University, the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), and Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). Throughout his career, he has established internationally recognized research programs in computer vision, multimedia understanding, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Prof Chang has led numerous national and industry-funded research projects and has published more than 150 papers in leading journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR. His publications have received about 30,000 citations according to Google Scholar, with 21 papers recognized as ESI Highly Cited or Hot Papers.
In recognition of his scientific contributions, Prof Chang was named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher for seven consecutive years from 2019 to 2025 and was selected as an Elsevier Highly Cited Chinese Researcher in 2024. His research has been widely adopted and reported internationally, spanning applications in healthcare, intelligent systems, multimodal learning, and large foundation models.
Prof Chang actively contributes to the global research community through editorial and leadership roles. He serves as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), and ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications (TOMM), and regularly serves as Area Chair for premier international conferences in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and machine learning.
His long-term vision is to establish the scientific foundations of Embodied Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). He aims to develop intelligent agents that continuously learn from experience, interact effectively with the physical world, and collaborate with humans to address complex scientific and societal challenges.
Research Interests
Prof Chang’s research focuses on Embodied Artificial Intelligence, Multimodal Foundation Models, and Brain-Inspired Intelligence. His goal is to develop intelligent agents that can perceive, reason, learn, and act autonomously in complex real-world environments. By integrating multimodal perception, memory, reasoning, and decision-making, his research seeks to advance the foundations of next-generation artificial intelligence systems.
His current research interests include:
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Embodied Artificial Intelligence: Embodied agents, robot learning, world models, embodied reasoning, and decision-making in dynamic environments.
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Multimodal Foundation Models: Large-scale vision-language-action models, multimodal large language models, multimodal reasoning, and foundation models for embodied intelligence.
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Brain-Inspired Artificial Intelligence: Cognitive architectures, memory mechanisms, neuro-symbolic reasoning, and biologically inspired learning paradigms.
News
| Mar 13rd, 2023 | One paper on When Object Detection Meets Knowledge Distillation:A Survey has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)! [link] |
| Dec 20th, 2022 | Congratulations to Mingjie on securing a PostDoc position at Stanford University! |
| Jul 14th, 2022 | One paper titled DS-Net++:Dynamic Weight Slicing for Efficient Inference in CNNs and Vision Transformers has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)! [link] |
| Jun 13rd, 2022 | One paper titled TN-ZSTAD:Transferable Network for Zero-Shot Temporal Activity Detection has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)! [link]. |
| May 31st, 2022 | One paper titled Video Pivoting Unsupervised Multi-modal Machine Translation has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)! [link] |
| March 3rd, 2022 | Seven papers accepted by CVPR 2022! Congratulations to my students! |
| December 30th, 2021 | One paper on Semantics-Guided Contrastive Network for Zero-Shot Object detection has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)! [link] |
| December 20th, 2021 | Our survey paper A Comprehensive Survey of Scene Graphs:Generation and Application has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)! [link] |
| November 9th, 2021 | Our paper on Differentiable Generative Adversarial Networks Search for Zero-Shot Learning has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)! [link] |
| October 10th, 2021 | Our paper on Medical Report Generation has been accepted by NeurIPS 2021! |
| July 23rd, 2021 | Three papers accepted by ICCV 2021! |
| July 4th, 2021 | Our paper on Multimodal Compatibility Modeling has been accepted by ACM MM 2021! |
| May 8th, 2021 | Our paper on Neural Architecture Search has been accepted by ICML 2021! |
| April 16th, 2021 | Our survey paper on Person Search has been accepted by IJCAI 2021 Survey Track. Congratulations to Xiangtan! |
| April 9th, 2021 | Our ICCV workshop "Human Interaction for Robotic Navigation" has been accepted! |
| March 1st, 2021 | Two papers accepted by CVPR 2021! |
| January 18th, 2021 | Our survey on Neural Architecture Search has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys! |
| January 13rd, 2021 | One paper on multi-agent reinforcement learning has been accepted by ICLR 2021 as spotlight presentation! [pdf] |
| December 14th, 2020 | One paper on large-scale multimedia retrieval has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (T-MM)! |
| October 31st, 2020 | One paper on Object Tracking accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP)! |
| October 27th, 2020 | One paper on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI)! |
| September 26th, 2020 | Two papers on Neural Architecture Search (NAS) accepted by NeurIPS 2020! |
| August 9th, 2020 | A survey on Deep Active Learning is released! [pdf] |
| July 29th, 2020 | Paper accepted by ACM MM 2020 on scene graph! Paper title - Memory-Based Network for Scene Graph with Unbalanced Relations. |
| July 11th, 2020 | Paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Image Processing on zero-shot object detection! Paper title - Semantics Preserving Graph Propagation for Zero-Shot Object Detection. |
| July 3rd, 2020 | Paper accepted by ECCV 2020 on video object detection! Paper title - Mining Inter-Video Proposal Relations for Video Object Detection. |
| June 19th, 2020 | Our work on COVID-19 CT Report Generation was covered by [The Australian], [Mirage News], [ResearchNews], [AZoRobotics] and [Monash IT News]! [AI for Social Good] |
| June 6th, 2020 | We have released the first public COVID-19 CT Report dataset! [Project Page] | [pdf] |
| June 1st, 2020 | A survey on Neural Architecture Search is released! [arXiv] | [pdf] | [专知] |
| May 16th, 2020 | Two papers accepted by KDD 2020! |
| May 16th, 2020 | One paper accepted by KDD 2020 on Graph Neural Networks and Time Series Preidiction! Paper title - Connecting the Dots. Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks. [pdf] |
| April 20th, 2020 | One paper accepted by IJCAI 2020 on graphical model estimation! Paper title - Quadratic Sparse Gaussian Graphical Model Estimation Method for Massive Variables. |
| April 7th, 2020 | I am approved to be promoted to Senior Lecturer with effect from 1 July 2020! |
| April 4th, 2020 | One paper accepted by ACL 2020 on multimodal neural machine translation! Paper title - Unsupervised Multimodal Neural Machine Translation with Pseudo Visual Pivoting [pdf] |
| April 3rd, 2020 | A survey on Person Search is released! [pdf] |
| April 1st, 2020 | A survey on Scene Graph is released! [pdf] [Awesome Paper List] |
| Febuary 23rd, 2020 | Six papers accepted by CVPR 2020! |
| Febuary 23rd, 2020 | Paper accepted by CVPR 2020 on vision-lanuage navigation! Paper title - Vision-Language Navigation with Self-Supervised Auxiliary Reasoning Tasks [pdf] [DEMO] [Oral] |
| Febuary 23rd, 2020 | Paper accepted by CVPR 2020 on zero-shot temporal activity detection! Paper title - ZSTAD Zero-Shot Temporal Activity Detection [pdf] |
| Febuary 23rd, 2020 | Paper accepted by CVPR 2020 on person re-identification! Paper title - Unity Style Transfer for Person Re-Identification [pdf] |
| Febuary 23rd, 2020 | Paper accepted by CVPR 2020 on nueral architecture search! Paper title - Neural Architecture Search by Block-wisely Distilling Architecture Knowledge [pdf] [code] |
| Feburary 23rd, 2020 | Paper accepted by CVPR 2020 on visual-dialog navigation! Paper title - Vision Dialogue Navigation by Exploring Cross-modal Memory [pdf] [code] |
| January 11th, 2020 | Paper accepted by WWW 2020 on graph convolutional networks! Paper title - Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks [pdf] |
| November 23rd, 2019 | We got the Best Paper Award from The 15th International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA 2019)! |
| November 15th, 2019 | We achieved first place in the TRECVID 2019 ActEV Challenge! [DEMO] |
| August 29th, 2019 | Demo presentation accepted by ICCV 2019! Title - Traffic Danger Recognition With Surveillance Cameras Without Training Data [DEMO] |
| August 12nd, 2019 | Paper accepted by EMNLP/IJCNLP 2019 on multi-modal learning! Paper title - Multi-Head Attention with Diversity for Learning Grounded Multilingual Multimodal Representations [pdf] |
| July 1st, 2019 | Paper accepted by ACM MM 2019 on multi-modal learning! Paper title - Annotation Efficient Cross-Modal Retrieval with Adversarial Attentive Alignment [pdf] |
| December 3rd, 2018 | I have joined the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University as a Lecturer (tenure-track Asssitant Professor) and a DECRA Fellow! |
| November 28th, 2018 | I have been awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellowship! |
| October 15th, 2018 | I will join the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University as a Lecturer (tenure-track Assistant Professor) in December 2018. |