About me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Stony Brook University, advised by Prof. Dimitris Samaras. I also collaborate with Prof. Simon Birrer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. I have also been a visiting doctoral student at EPFL with Prof. Pascal Fua. Before that, I completed my B.S. in Data Science and Honors Computer Science at the University of Michigan, where I worked with Prof. David Fouhey. I was a research intern at Futurewei Technologies from February to August 2026.

Research interests: computer vision, machine learning, and astronomy image analysis.

Download CV · Full publication list

Selected Publications

COSMIO: A Benchmark for Cross-Survey Modality Imputation

Dichang Zhang, Yixuan Shao, Jiali Cui, Haotian Yin, Yuanpeng Liu, Jiaqi Deng, Xiang Gao, Zhiqiang Lao, Heather Yu, Simon Birrer, Dimitris Samaras

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026. Accepted for publication.

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A General-Purpose VLM Can Teach an Astronomy Foundation Model to Better Recognize Galaxy Morphology

Dichang Zhang, Jiaqi Deng, Yixuan Shao, Yuanpeng Liu, Jiali Cui, Zhiqiang Lao, Heather Yu, Liang Peng, Simon Birrer, Dimitris Samaras

arXiv:2608.02300 [cs.CV], 2026.

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AS-Bridge: A Bidirectional Generative Framework Bridging Next-Generation Astronomical Surveys

Dichang Zhang, Yixuan Shao, Simon Birrer, Dimitris Samaras

ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2026.

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Fast and Accurate Emulation of the SDO/HMI Stokes Inversion with Uncertainty Quantification

Richard E. L. Higgins, David F. Fouhey, Dichang Zhang, Spiro K. Antiochos, Graham Barnes, J. Todd Hoeksema, K. D. Leka, Yang Liu, Peter W. Schuck, Tamas I. Gombosi

The Astrophysical Journal, 2021.

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Other Publications