Hi, I am Haohao Zhu. I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, advised by Prof. Jiayu Zhou and a member of the Illidan Lab. My research interests include machine learning, causal reasoning, and multimodal AI. I am interested in building AI systems that are reliable, interpretable, and useful for real-world problems.
I have been exploring how causal ideas and large language models can help us better understand complex data across different modalities, such as text, images, and structured information. My current applications focus on K–12 education and healthcare.
News
- August 2026: Check out our preprint paper from my internship at Ellipsis Health!
- June 2026: I will present our paper, Too Sure to Be Right High-Confidence Wrong and Latent Failure Signals in Medical VQA, at MMFM-BIOMED @ CVPR 2026.
- June 2026: Happy to join Ellipsis Health as a Research Intern!
- May 2026: Our paper, Conversational Semantic Dynamics for Mild Cognitive Impairment Detection, was accepted to AMIA.
- August 2025: Our paper, Enhancing Automated Grading in Science Education through LLM-Driven Causal Reasoning and Multimodal Analysis, was published in IJCAI 2025.
- August 2025: I started my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Education
- Ph.D. Student. School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA — Aug 2025 – Present
- B.S. in Intelligence Science & Technology, Tianjin Normal University, China — Sep 2020 – 2024
Publications
- Yong Su, Haohao Zhu* et al. PRIME: Privacy-Preserving Video Anomaly Detection via Motion Exemplar Guidance. Knowledge-Based Systems, 2023. (*first student author)
- Haohao Zhu, Tingting Li, Peng He, Jiayu Zhou. Enhancing Automated Grading in Science Education through LLM-Driven Causal Reasoning and Multimodal Analysis. IJCAI, 2025.
Teaching & Mentorship
- Teaching Assistant, CSE 331: Algorithms and Data Structures, Michigan State University — Fall 2024
Review Service
Journals: ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, Neurocomputing, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics
Conferences: IJCAI, KDD, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR
Interests & Hobbies
- Houseplants & Sourdoughs
- Life with my cats “Fluffy” & “Boba”