About me

I’m Jiaxing Zhang, a Research Scientist at TikTok working on vision–language models. I earned my Ph.D. in Informatics from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in May 2025, (co-)supervised by Prof. Hua Wei@ASU and Prof. Michael Lee@NJIT, and a B.S. in Computer Science (Honored Science Program) from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2020, with study experiences at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and the University of Alberta.

My research centers on trustworthy & explainable AI for Graph Neural Networks (e.g., information bottleneck and confidence-aware explanations), deep learning (LLMs/VLMs) for video moderation, and NLP for code intelligence. Representative works include MixupExplainer (KDD’23), ProxyExplainer (ICML’24), RegExplainer (NeurIPS’24), and ConfExplainer (KDD’25). Previously, I was a Senior Data Scientist at Walmart Global Tech (recommender systems and knowledge graphs) and an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon (model retraining under distribution shift).

I serve as a reviewer for KDD, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, AISTATS, WACV, PKDD and as AAAI PC, and I am an ACM Professional Member (2025–2026).

I actively welcome research collaborations across areas including (but not limited to): GNNs and their applications/explainability, LLM/VLM explainability and architecture optimization, training strategy optimization, video compression, and ML infrastructure. I’m also open to working with motivated, well-prepared interns.

[updated by 09/27/2025]