Zeyi Huang

I am a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, advised by Prof. Yong Jae Lee. Prior to UW–Madison, I obtained my M.S. degree from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I worked with Dr. Dong Huang, Prof. Haohan Wang, and Prof. Eric Xing. I received my B.E. degree from Nanjing University of Science and Technology.

I have interned at Microsoft with Yelong Shen; at Meta with Daniel Bolya, Christoph Feichtenhofer, and Miao Liu; and at Adobe with Zongze Wu and Eli Shechtman.

Research Interests

My research focuses on large language model training, particularly recurrent transformer architectures and their pre-training and post-training. I am interested in new forms of recurrent and latent computation for building more capable and compute-efficient language models. My broader interests include multimodal foundation models, building on prior work in vision and video understanding.

Selected Publications

Trading Depth for Time in Recurrent Transformers

Zeyi Huang^*, Xuehai He^*, Yong Jae Lee^†, Yelong Shen^†

Preprint 2026

arXiv / Code

Latent Recurrent Transformer: Architecture Exploration, Training Strategies, and Scaling Behavior

Zeyi Huang^*, Xuehai He^*, LiLiang Ren, Yiping Wang, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Shuohang Wang, Pengcheng He, Jianfeng Gao, Yong Jae Lee^†, Yelong Shen^†

EMNLP 2026

arXiv / Code

VisualToolAgent (VisTA): A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Visual Tool Selection

Zeyi Huang, Yuyang Ji, Anirudh Sundara Rajan, Zefan Cai, Wen Xiao, Haohan Wang, Junjie Hu, Yong Jae Lee

CVPR 2026

arXiv / Code

Building a Mind Palace: Structuring Environment-Grounded Semantic Graphs for Effective Long Video Analysis with LLMs

Zeyi Huang^*, Yuyang Ji^*, Xiaofang Wang, Nikhil Mehta, Tong Xiao, Donghyun Lee, Sigmund Vanvalkenburgh, Shengxin Zha, Bolin Lai, Licheng Yu, Ning Zhang, Yong Jae Lee^†, Miao Liu^†

CVPR 2025

arXiv / Code