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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). 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 fortunate to work closely with Prof. Ying-Cong Chen, Prof. Harry Yang, Prof. Qifeng Chen 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

    Temporal Regularization Makes Your Video Generator Stronger
    Harold Haodong Chen, Haojian Huang, Xianfeng Wu, Yexin Liu, Yajing Bai, Wen-Jie Shu, Harry Yang†, Ser-Nam Lim†
    Technical Report, 2025
    [arXiv] [Webpage]

    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]

    FinePhys: Fine-grained Human Action Generation by Explicitly Incorporating Physical Laws for Effective Skeletal Guidance
    Dian Shao†, Mingfei Shi, Shengda Xu, Haodong Chen, Yongle Huang, Binglu Wang
    IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
    [Paper] [arXiv] [Webpage] [Code]

    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]

    UrbanCLIP: Learning Text-enhanced Urban Region Profiling with Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining from the Web
    Yibo Yan, Haomin Wen, Siru Zhong, Wei Chen, Haodong Chen, Qingsong Wen, Roger Zimmermann, Yuxuan Liang†
    ACM International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2024 (Oral Presentation)
    [Paper] [arXiv] [Video] [Code]

    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