Chen Zhao, Ph.D.

Education

• PhD, The University of Texas at Dallas (2021)
• MS, University at Albany – State University of New York (2016)
• MS, Albany Medical College (2016)

Research Interests

• Trustworthy AI
• Agentic AI
• Large Language Models (LLMs)
• AI for Science (AI4Science)

Bio

Dr. Chen Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Baylor University. Prior to joining Baylor, he was a senior R&D computer vision engineer at Kitware Inc. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2021. He received dual M.S. degrees in Computer Science and Biomedical Science from the State University of New York at Albany (UAlbany), and Albany Medical College in 2016. 

His publications have appeared in prestigious conferences and journals, including NeurIPS, KDD, CVPR, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, ACM Computing Surveys, TMLR, TKDD, KAIS, KBS, BIB, etc. He has served as an Area Chair and PC member for several international conferences and workshops, such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, AAAI, etc. More information can be found in his homepage: https://charliezhaoyinpeng.github.io/homepage/ .

Selected Publications

• [NeurIPS'26] HierFlow: Hierarchical Coupled Dual-Space Search for Automatic Agentic Workflow Generation Dong Li, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Xintao Wu, Zhong Chen, Chen Zhao, Haifeng Chen In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2026
• [IJCAI'26] PURE: Purging Unrelated Representations for Content-Agnostic Forgery Detection Xinyu Wu, Dong Li, Minglai Shao, Xintao Wu, Zhong Chen, Chen Zhao In Proceedings of the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026
• [ACM Computing Surveys] A Survey of AI for Materials Science: Foundation Models, LLM Agents, Datasets, and Tools Minh-Hao Van, Prateek Verma, Chen Zhao, Xintao Wu ACM Computing Surveys, 2026
• [NeurIPS'25] SolverLLM: Leveraging Test-Time Scaling for Optimization Problem via LLM-Guided Search Dong Li, Xujiang Zhao, Linlin Yu, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Zhong Chen, Feng Chen, Chen Zhao, Haifeng Chen In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025
• [KDD'24] Algorithmic Fairness Generalization under Covariate and Dependence Shifts Simultaneously Chen Zhao, Kai Jiang, Xintao Wu, Haoliang Wang, Latifur Khan, Christan Earl Grant, Feng Chen In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2024
• [KDD'23] Towards Fair Disentangled Online Learning for Changing Environments Chen Zhao, Feng Mi, Xintao Wu, Kai Jiang, Latifur Khan, Christan Earl Grant, Feng Che In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2023
• [CVPR'23] Open Set Action Recognition via Multi-Label Evidential Learning Chen Zhao, Dawei Du, Anthony Hoogs, Christopher Funk In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2023