Joey Tianyi Zhou

As the Head of the Applied AI Systems & Agents Chapter at the Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), I drive the development of the A*STAR Agentic AI platform. Simultaneously, as Deputy Director at the Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR). I am also heading AI Engineering & Platform at the National Applied AI Centre of Excellence (CoE), driving the adoption of Agentic AI across companies in Singapore. Concurrently, I am also tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science in Singapore Management Univerisity (SMU). I obtained my Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2015. Prior to my current roles at A*STAR, I worked as a Senior Research Engineer at the Sony US Research Center in San Jose, California.

My research focus is on how to enhance AI Efficiency and Robustness from a data perspective. An ideal machine learning model shall : (1) be resource-efficient for both inference and training, including computational-efficient and data-efficient; (2)be safe to various perturbations, distribution shifts, and adversarial attacks.

A*STAR Email / SMU Email / Github / Google Scholar /



Joey
  • Ph.D students: Heng Zhao (USTC, BSc; NTU, MSc; 2021 Intake), Yinjie Zhao (NTU, BENG; ACIS scholarship, 2023 Intake), Cheng Shen (UCI, BSc; NYU, MSc; SINGA scholarship, 2023 Intake), Zhiya Tan (SCUT, BA, 2024 Intake)
  • Interns and Visiting Scholars:~30 students/scholars
  • I am always actively seeking talented individuals interested in AI, especially agentic AI. The following scholarships will be funded by either SMU or A*STAR. If you want to visit me during your studies, you may apply for a joint Ph.D. scholarship ARAP, or CFAR internship scheme CIARE, ARIA. I can host the visiting students (e.g., CSC program from China) at SMU or A*STAR. Please feel free to reach out to me.
    New! I am joining SMU as a tenured Assoc. Prof. I have several Ph.D Scholarships to be filled.
    New! Call for interns (available now): I always seek talented students to join my team. Ph.D. scholarships or official research positions will be prioritized for excellent performers.
    New! Call for research fellows/Scientists (available now): I need to hire research scientis/fellows in agentic AI domains. Strong coding and problem-solving skills are preferable.
    Research
    Resource-efficient AI

    Beyond Modality Collapse: Representation Blending for Multimodal Dataset Distillation
    Xin Zhang, Ziruo Zhang, Jiawei Du, Zuozhu Liu, Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In NeurIPS 2025

    CondenseLM: LLMs-driven Text Dataset Condensation via Reward Matching
    Cheng Shen, Yew-Soon Ong, Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In EMNLP 2025

    Breaking Class Barriers: Efficient Dataset Distillation via Inter-Class Feature Compensator
    Xin Zhang, Jiawei Du, Ping Liu, Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In ICLR 2025

    Diversity-Driven Synthesis: Enhancing Dataset Distillation through Directed Weight Adjustment
    Jiawei Du, Xin Zhang, Juncheng Hu, Wenxin Huang, Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In NeurIPS 2024 (Spotlight Paper)

    Evolution-aware VAriance (EVA) Coreset Selection for Medical Image Classification
    Yuxin Hong, Xiao Zhang, Xin Zhang, Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In ACM MM 2024 (Best Paper Nomination)

    Spanning Training Progress: Temporal Dual-Depth Scoring (TDDS) for Enhanced Dataset Pruning
    Xin Zhang, Jiawei Du, Weiying Xie, Yunsong Li, Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In CVPR 2024

    Multisize Dataset Condensation
    Yang He, Lingao Xiao, Joey Tianyi Zhou*, Ivor Tsang
    In ICLR 2024 (Oral, 1.2%)

    You Only Condense Once: Two Rules for Pruning Condensed Datasets
    Yang He, Lingao Xiao, Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In NeurIPS 2023

    Sequential Subset Matching for Dataset Distillation
    Jiawei Du, Qin Shi, Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In NeurIPS 2023

    Sharpness-aware training for free
    Jiawei Du, Daquan Zhou, Jiashi Feng, Vincent Y. F. Tan, Joey Tianyi Zhou,
    In NeurIPS 2022

    EDCompress: Energy-Aware Model Compression for Dataflows
    Zhehui Wang, Tao Luo, Rick Siow Mong Goh, and Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 2022

    Dual Adversarial Neural Transfer for Sequence Labeling
    Joey Tianyi Zhou, Hao Zhang, Di Jin, Xi Peng
    In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 2021

    Multi-source Meta Transfer for Low Resource Multiple Choice Question Answering
    Ming Yan, Hao Zhang, Di Jin and Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In ACL 2020

    A Deep Learning Framework for Hybrid Heterogeneous Transfer Learning
    Joey Tianyi Zhou, Sinno Jialin Pan, Ivor W. Tsang.
    In Artificial Intelligence 2019

    Multi-class Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation
    Joey Tianyi Zhou, Ivor W. Tsang, Sinno Jialin Pan and Mingkui Tan
    In Journal of Machine Learning Research 2019

    Safe and Reliable AI

    TokenSwap: Backdoor Attack on the Compositional Understanding of Large Vision-Language Models
    Zhifang Zhang, Qiqi Tao, Jiaqi Lv, Na Zhao, Lei Feng, Joey Tianyi Zhou
    in ICML 2026.

    Poisoned Distillation: Injecting Backdoors into Distilled Datasets Without Raw Data Access
    Ziyuan Yang, Ming Yan, Yi Zhang, Joey Tianyi Zhou
    in AAAI 2026.

    Identifying and Mitigating Social Bias Knowledge in Language Models
    Ruizhe Chen, Yichen Li, Jianfei Yang, Yang Feng, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu,
    In NAACL 2025

    Shortcuts Arising from Contrast: Towards Effective and Lightweight Clean-Label Attacks in Prompt-Based Learning
    Xiaopeng Xie, Ming Yan, Xiwen Zhou, Chenlong Zhao, Suli Wang, Yong Zhang, and Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In EMNLP 2024

    Meta Knowledge Condensation for Federated Learning
    Ping Liu, Xin Yu, and Joey Tianyi Zhou*
    In ICLR 2023

    Trusted Multi-View Classification with Dynamic Evidential Fusion
    Zongbo Han, Changqing Zhang, Huazhu Fu and Joey Tianyi Zhou
    In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 2022

    XAI Beyond Classification: Interpretable Neural Clustering
    Xi Peng, Yunfan Li, Ivor Tsang, Hongyuan Zhu, Jiancheng Lv, and Joey Tianyi Zhou
    In Journal of Machine Learning Research 2022

    PointBA: Towards Backdoor Attacks in 3D Point Cloud
    Xinke Li, Zhiru Chen, Yue Zhao, Zekun Tong, Yabang Zhao, Andrew Lim, Joey Tianyi Zhou
    In ICCV 2021

    Trusted Multi-View Classification
    Zongbo Han, Changqing Zhang, Huazhu Fu, Joey Tianyi Zhou
    In ICLR 2021

    Trustworthy Multimodal Regression with Mixture of Normal-inverse Gamma Distributions
    Huan Ma, Zongbo Han, Changqing Zhang, Huazhu Fu, Joey Tianyi Zhou and Qinghua Hu
    In NeurIPS 2021

    Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment
    Di Jin, Zhijing Jin, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Peter Szolovits
    In AAAI 2020

    Query-efficient Meta Attack to Deep Neural Networks
    Jiawei Du, Hu Zhang, Joey Tianyi Zhou*, Yi Yang, Jiashi Feng
    In ICLR 2020

    Large Foundation Model and Agentic Framework

    Evolving Quantitative Reasoning through Self-Play in Digital Twin Markets,
    Tianmi Ma, Wenxin Huang, Jiawei Du, Lin Li, Xian Zhong, Joey Tianyi Zhou,
    in ICML 2026.

    Agentic Spatio-Temporal Grounding via Collaborative Reasoning,
    Heng zhao, Yew-Soon Ong,Joey Tianyi Zhou*,
    in SIGIR 2026.

    Rethinking Agent Design: From Top-Down Workflows to Bottom-Up Skill Evolution
    Jiawei Du, Jinlong Wu, Chen Yuzheng, Yucheng Hu, Bing Li,Joey Tianyi Zhou
    Arxiv

    Agent Trading Arena: A Study on Numerical Understanding in LLM-Based Agents
    Tianmi Ma, Jiawei Du, Wenxin Huang, Wenjie Wang, Liang Xie, Xian Zhong, Joey Tianyi Zhou
    The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2025.

    STADe: Sensory Temporal Action Detection via Temporal-Spectral Representation Learning
    Bing Li, Haotian Duan, Yun Liu, Le Zhang, Wei Cui, Joey Tianyi Zhou
    In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 2025

    KPL: Training-Free Medical Knowledge Mining of Vision-Language Models
    Jiaxiang Liu, Tianxiang Hu, Jiawei Du, Ruiyuan Zhang, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Zuozhu Liu
    In EMNLP 2024

    Word2Pix: Word to Pixel Cross-Attention Transformer in Visual Grounding
    Heng Zhao, Joey Tianyi Zhou*, Yew-Soon Ong,
    In IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 2024

    Difformer: Multi-resolutional differencing transformer with dynamic ranging for time series analysis
    Bing Li, Wei Cui, Le Zhang, Ce Zhu, Wei Wang, Ivor W Tsang, Joey Tianyi Zhou
    In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 2023

    Locality-Aware Crowd Counting
    Joey Tianyi Zhou, Le Zhang, Du Jiawei, Xi Peng, Zhiwen Fang, Zhe Xiao, Hongyuan Zhu
    In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 2021

    Natural Language Video Localization: A Revisit in Span-based Question Answering Framework
    Hao Zhang, Aixin Sun, Wei Jing, Liangli Zhen, Joey Tianyi Zhou* and Rick Siow Mong Goh
    In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 2020

    AnomalyNet: An Anomaly Detection Network for Video Surveillance
    Joey Tianyi Zhou, Jiawei Du, Hongyuan Zhu, Xi Peng, Yong Liu, Rick Siow Mong Goh
    In IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security 2019


    Academic Service
    Associate Editor/Editorial Board: Senior/Area Chair: Programme Chair/Organising Committee: Proposal Expert Panel:
    • Expert Panel in the Ministry of Education (MOE) Academic Research Fund.
    Membership:
    • IEEE Senior Member
    • INNS Member, AICI Section Technical Coordinator
    • EAI Distinguished Member

    Awards

    Competitive Funding Award

    (imitation is the sincerest form of flattery)