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Harold Haodong Chen

Ph.D. Student
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Email: haroldchen328 [at] gmail.com

Biography

I'm a PhD student at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), supervised by Prof. Ying-Cong Chen and Prof. Qifeng Chen. I obtained my B.E. degree at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) with Outstanding Graduate Award in 2025, where I worked closely with Prof. Dian Shao. I'm also fortunate to work closely with Prof. Harry Yang and Prof. Ser-Nam Lim.

I am always open to all forms of research collaboration. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in working with me! My research interests include Video Generation & Understanding, Agentic System, and Embodied AI.

News

  • [09/2025] One paper is accepted to NeurIPS'25!
  • [07/2025] One paper is accepted to MM'25!
  • [05/2025] One paper is accepted to ICML'25!
  • [02/2025] One paper is accepted to CVPR'25!
  • [02/2025] Served as a reviewer for ICCV'25.
  • [02/2025] Served as a reviewer for Pattern Recognition.
  • [12/2024] Served as a reviewer for ICML'25.
  • [12/2024] One paper is accepted to AAAI'25!
  • [11/2024] Served as a reviewer for CVPR'25.
  • [08/2024] Served as a reviewer for ICLR'25.
    More
  • [07/2024] Two paper are accepted to MM'24!
  • [05/2024] Served as a reviewer for NeurIPS'24.
  • [02/2024] Served as a reviewer for ECCV'24.
  • [01/2024] Served as a reviewer for MM'24.
  • [01/2024] One paper is accepted to WWW'24 as Oral Presentation!

    • Experience

    Visiting Student | HKUST
    Time: 11/2024 - 6/2025. Advisor: Prof. Harry Yang

    Research Intern | Everlyn AI
    Time: 8/2024 - 5/2025. Mentor: Prof. Ser-Nam Lim

    Research Intern | HKGAI
    Time: 5/2024 - 8/2024. Mentor: Prof. Wenhan Luo

    Selected Preprints

    Go with Your Gut: Scaling Confidence for Autoregressive Image Generation
    Harold Haodong Chen*, Xianfeng Wu*, Wen-Jie Shu, Rongjin Guo, Disen Lan, Harry Yang, Ying-Cong Chen†
    Preprint, 2025
    [arXiv] [Code]

    LightGen: Efficient Image Generation through Knowledge Distillation and Direct Preference Optimization
    Xianfeng Wu*, Yajing Bai*, Haoze Zheng*, Harold Haodong Chen* (co-first), Yexin Liu*, Zihao Wang, Xuran Ma, Wen-Jie Shu, Harry Yang†, Ser-Nam Lim†
    Technical Report, 2025
    [arXiv] [Code]

    GaussianVTON: 3D Human Virtual Try-ON via Multi-Stage Gaussian Splatting Editing with Image Prompting
    Haodong Chen, Yongle Huang, Haojian Huang, Xiangsheng Ge, Dian Shao†
    Technical Report, 2024
    [arXiv] [Webpage] [Code]

    Selected Publications

    Hierarchical Fine-grained Preference Optimization for Physically Plausible Video Generation
    Harold Haodong Chen, Haojian Huang, Qifeng Chen, Harry Yang†, Ser-Nam Lim†
    Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
    [Paper] [arXiv] [Webpage]

    FineQuest: Adaptive Knowledge-Assisted Sports Video Understanding via Agent-of-Thoughts Reasoning
    Haodong Chen, Haojian Huang, Xinxiang Yin, Dian Shao†
    ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), 2025
    [Paper] [arXiv]

    VistaDPO: Video Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Direct Preference Optimization for Large Video Models
    Haojian Huang*, Haodong Chen* (co-first), Shengqiong Wu, Meng Luo, Jinlan Fu, Xinya Du, Hanwang Zhang, Hao Fei†
    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
    [Paper] [arXiv] [Code] [Dataset]

    SeFAR: Semi-supervised Fine-grained Action Recognition with Temporal Perturbation and Learning Stabilization
    Yongle Huang*, Haodong Chen* (co-first), Zhenbang Xu, Zihan Jia, Haozhou Sun, Dian Shao†
    AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025
    [Paper] [arXiv] [Code] [Dataset]

    FineCLIPER: Multi-modal Fine-grained CLIP for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition with AdaptERs
    Haodong Chen, Haojian Huang, Junhao Dong, Mingzhe Zheng, Dian Shao†
    ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), 2024
    [Paper] [arXiv] [Webpage]

    Awards and Honors

  • Postgraduate Scholarship, HKUST(GZ)
    		•  2025
  • Outstanding Graduate, NPU
    		•  2025
  • Postgraduate Scholarship, HKUST
    		•  2025
  • Outstanding University Student, NPU
    		•  2023-2024
  • University Scholarship, NPU
    		•  2023-2024
  • University Student Innovation Fund, Ministry of Education of P.R. China
    		•  2023

    Services

  • Conference Reviewer,
      European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
      ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), 2024
      Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024-2025
      International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
      International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025
      International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025-2026
      Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025-2026
      Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2025-2026
      AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2026
  • Journal Reviewer,
      Pattern Recognition, ACM TOMM