Jiaru Zhang

Jiaru Zhang

Postdoc researcher at Purdue University

Purdue University

Biography

I am a postdoc researcher at Purdue university, directed by Prof. Ziran Wang and Prof. Ruqi Zhang. I received my Ph.D. degree of Computer Science at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in June 2024, supervised by Prof. Haibing Guan, and co-supervised by Prof. Yang Hua, Prof. Tao Song, and Prof. Ruhui Ma.

Interests
  • Generative AI
  • Bayesian Deep Learning
  • Autonomous Driving
Education

  • PhD in Computer Science and Technology, 2019.9 - 2024.6

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  • BSc in Computer Science and Technology (IEEE Honor Class), 2015.9 - 2019.6

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  • Electrical Engineering International Intensive program, 2017.6 - 2017.8

    University of Washington

Publication List

Jiaru Zhang, Manav Gagvani, Can Cui, Juntong Peng, Ruqi Zhang, Ziran Wang (2026). Efficient and Explainable End-to-End Autonomous Driving via Masked Vision-Language-Action Diffusion. In IROS.

PDF Code

Can Cui, Jiaru Zhang, Yupeng Zhou, Juntong Peng, Sung-Yeon Park, Zichong Yang, Prashanth Sankaranarayanan, Ruqi Zhang, Ziran Wang (2026). ViLaD: A Large Vision Language Diffusion Framework for End-to-End Autonomous Driving. In IROS.

PDF

Xiaoyu Wu, Jiaru Zhang, Yang Hua, Bohan Lyu, Hao Wang, Tao Song, Haibing Guan (2026). Exploring Diffusion Models' Corruption Stage in Few-Shot Fine-tuning and Mitigating with Bayesian Neural Networks. In SIGKDD.

PDF Poster

Jiaru Zhang, Juanwu Lu, Xiaoyu Wu, Ziran Wang, Ruqi Zhang (2026). Accelerating Inference of Discrete Autoregressive Normalizing Flows by Selective Jacobi Decoding. In TMLR (Featured Certification).

PDF Code OpenReview

See all publications

Internship Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Microsoft Research Asia
Research Intern
Microsoft Research Asia
November 2022 – August 2023 Beijing
Mentor: Justin Ding.
 
 
 
 
 
China International Capital Corporation Limited
Research Intern
China International Capital Corporation Limited
August 2023 – September 2023 Shanghai

Academic Service

  • Organizer: 5th LLVM-AD Workshop @ IEEE/CVF WACV 2026
  • Organizer: 4th LLVM-AD Workshop @ IEEE ITSC 2025
  • Conference reviewer: ACL ARR May 2026, NeurIPS 2026, ICML 2026, IROS 2026, CVPR 2026, AISTATS 2026, SIGKDD 2026, AAAI 2026, NeurIPS 2025, ICCV 2025, ACMMM 2025, KDD 2025, ICML 2025, CVPR 2025, AAAI 2025, ICPR 2024, NeurIPS 2024, CVPR 2024, ICML 2024, ICLR 2023, NeurIPS 2023, EAI CollaborateCom 2022.
  • Journal reviewer: Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Software: Practice and Experience, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, IEEE Internet of Things Journal.

Talks

Generative Diffusion Language Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Parallel Planning and Explainable Action
An IPAI Seminar Series talk on generative diffusion language models for end-to-end autonomous driving, focusing on parallel planning and explainable action.
Feb 3, 2026 Institute of Physical AI, Purdue University
Slides
Generative Diffusion Language Model for End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Parallel Planning and Explainable Action
How to read and write scientific paper?
A sharing about how to read and write papers for students new to research
Jul 27, 2023 6:00 PM — 8:00 PM Shanghai
Slides
How to read and write scientific paper?
Learning to Confuse: Generating Training Time Adversarial Data with Auto-Encoder
A group sharing about the NeurIPS 2019 paper Learning to Confuse: Generating Training Time Adversarial Data with Auto-Encoder.
Mar 8, 2022 7:00 PM — 8:00 PM Shanghai
Slides
Learning to Confuse: Generating Training Time Adversarial Data with Auto-Encoder
See all talks

Contests

Baidu
I won the first place among 222 teams in the 2020-11 season in the graph neural network node classification competition organized by Baidu.
See certificate

Awards

  • Commendable reviewer, KDD (2025)
  • Stars of Tomorrow (Award of Excellent Intern of Microsoft Research Asia) (2023)
  • CETC The 14TH Research Institute Glarun Scholarship (2021)
  • Three Good Student of SJTU (2018, 2020, 2021)
  • Excellent League Member of SJTU (2016, 2020, 2021)
  • Outstanding graduate of SJTU (2019)
  • Excellent Student Cadre of SJTU (2016)

Contact