Zhihao Chen

📍 Lausanne, Switzerland

I am an MSc student in Data Science at EPFL and a Graduate Student Researcher at VILAB. My research centers on multimodal foundation models and representation learning. While LLMs are powerful, modeling vision purely through language-centric approaches feels counter-intuitive. I believe multimodal intelligence requires efficient representations that genuinely leverage rich perceptual signals. I am interested in how foundation models can learn shared representations across modalities to reason and generate in a unified way, making them more adaptable, reliable, and useful in open-ended real-world settings.

I earned a BSc in Artificial Intelligence from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). Previously, I completed my bachelor thesis as a Research Intern at CVC-UAB, under the supervision of Joost van de Weijer.

Outside of research, I enjoy working out, hiking, and drawing ;).

I am currently looking for research intern opportunities starting in Summer 2027. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to chat!

news

Sep 30, 2026	Our paper, “Continual Adaptation Across Modalities: Learning and Forgetting in Unified Multimodal Models”, was accepted to the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on CL4FMAgents. The preprint is available on arXiv:2610.38436.
Sep 15, 2026	Joined VILAB as a Graduate Student Researcher, working on unified multimodal modelling.
Sep 07, 2026	Started the MSc in Data Science at EPFL.
Sep 07, 2026	Started as a Student Teaching Assistant for EE-556 Mathematics of Data: From Theory to Computation at EPFL.
Jul 01, 2026	Defended my bachelor thesis and graduated with a BSc in Artificial Intelligence from UPC.

selected publications

Continual Adaptation Across Modalities: Learning and Forgetting in Unified Multimodal Models

Xinrui Wang, Zhihao Chen, Jia Tang, and 4 more authors

In NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on CL4FMAgents, 2026

arXiv Bib PDF

@inproceedings{wang2026continual,
  title = {Continual Adaptation Across Modalities: Learning and Forgetting in Unified Multimodal Models},
  author = {Wang, Xinrui and Chen, Zhihao and Tang, Jia and Gomez-Villa, Alexandra and Twardowski, Bart{\l}omiej and van de Weijer, Joost and Chen, Songcan},
  booktitle = {NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on CL4FMAgents},
  year = {2026},
}