VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zanming Huang
dblp:332/1254
· DBLP profile ↗
6ranked-venue papers
2as first author
6since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 2 first-author · 6 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 2 first-author · 4 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
5 papers |
Reinforcement learning · 41% Language models and text generation · 31% Efficient and distributed learning · 12% | |
| Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
1 paper |
Information retrieval · 100% | |
| Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
1 paper |
Computing education · 100% |
Topics — the 13 heaviest of 14, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › imitation learning › offline imitation learning
behavior cloning |
1.4 | 2 | 2024 | Feedback-Guided Autonomous Driving · CVPR 2024 Coaching a Teachable Student · CVPR 2023 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
LLM agents |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge · NeurIPS 2025 |
Information retrieval
agentic search |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge · NeurIPS 2025 |
Information retrieval
retrieval evaluation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge · NeurIPS 2025 |
Information retrieval
search engines |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge · NeurIPS 2025 |
Information retrieval
web search |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-Judge · NeurIPS 2025 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
large language model |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Feedback-Guided Autonomous Driving · CVPR 2024 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning › model-based reinforcement learning
world model |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Neural Volumetric World Models for Autonomous Driving · ECCV (17) 2024 |
Computing education
educational data mining |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Scalable Early Childhood Reading Performance Prediction · NeurIPS 2024 |
Computing education
learning analytics |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Scalable Early Childhood Reading Performance Prediction · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › model compression
knowledge distillation |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Coaching a Teachable Student · CVPR 2023 |
Computer vision › Segmentation and scene understanding
scene understanding |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Neural Volumetric World Models for Autonomous Driving · ECCV (17) 2024 |
Accessibility and assistive technology
assistive navigation |
0.2 | 1 | 2022 | ASSISTER: Assistive Navigation via Conditional Instruction Generation · ECCV (36) 2022 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
tree-structured rubric design · 1.7LLM-as-a-judge · 1.7conditional generation · 1.1self-supervised learning · 0.8neural volumetric rendering · 0.8multilayer perceptron · 0.8masked input pretraining · 0.8large language model feedback · 0.8corrective feedback · 0.8student-paced coaching · 0.7privileged teacher distillation · 0.7imitation learning · 0.7
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Mind2Web 2: Evaluating Agentic Search with Agent-as-a-JudgeabstractAgentic search such as Deep Research systems-where agents autonomously browse the web, synthesize information, and return comprehensive citation-backed answers-represents a major shift in how users interact with web-scale information. While promising greater efficiency and cognitive offloading, the growing complexity and open-endedness of agentic search have outpaced existing evaluation benchmarks and methodologies, which largely assume short search horizons and static answers. In this paper, we introduce Mind2Web 2, a benchmark of 130 realistic, high-quality, and long-horizon tasks that require real-time web browsing and extensive information synthesis, constructed with over 1000 hours of human labor. To address the challenge of evaluating time-varying and complex answers, we propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge framework. Our method constructs task-specific judge agents based on a tree-structured rubric design to automatically assess both answer correctness and source attribution. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ten frontier agentic search systems and human performance, along with a detailed error analysis to draw insights for future development. The best-performing system, OpenAI Deep Research, can already achieve 50-70% of human performance while spending half the time, highlighting its great potential. Altogether, Mind2Web 2 provides a rigorous foundation for developing and benchmarking the next generation of agentic search systems. Boyu Gou, Zanming Huang, Yuting Ning, Yu Gu 0016, Michael Lin, Weijian Qi, Andrei Kopanev, Botao Yu, Bernal Jimenez Gutierrez, Yiheng Shu, Chan Hee Song, Jiaman Wu, Hanane Nour Moussa, Tianshu Zhang 0001, Yifei Li 0005, Tianci Xue, Zeyi Liao, Kai Zhang 0033, Boyuan Zheng 0001, Zhaowei Cai, Viktor Rozgic, Morteza Ziyadi, Huan Sun 0001, Yu Su 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2024 | Feedback-Guided Autonomous DrivingabstractWhile behavior cloning has recently emerged as a highly successful paradigm for autonomous driving, humans rarely learn to perform complex tasks, such as driving, via imitation or behavior cloning alone. In contrast, learning in humans often involves additional detailed guidance throughout the interactive learning process, i.e., where feedback, often via language, provides detailed information as to which part of their trial was performed incorrectly or suboptimally and why. Motivated by this observation, we introduce an efficient feedback-based framework for improving behavior-cloning-based training of sensorimotor driving agents. Our key insight is to leverage recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide corrective fine-grained feedback regarding the underlying reason behind driving prediction failures. Moreover, our introduced network architecture is efficient, enabling the first sensorimotor end-to-end training and evaluation of LLM-based driving models. The resulting agent achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-loop evaluation on nuScenes, outperforming prior state-of-the-art by over 8.1% and 57.1% in accuracy and collision rate, respectively. In CARLA, our camera-based agent improves by 16.6% in driving score over prior LIDAR-based approaches. Jimuyang Zhang, Zanming Huang, Arijit Ray, Eshed Ohn-Bar |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2024 | Neural Volumetric World Models for Autonomous Driving
Zanming Huang, Jimuyang Zhang, Eshed Ohn-Bar |
ECCV (17) | 1 |
| 2024 | Scalable Early Childhood Reading Performance PredictionabstractModels for student reading performance can empower educators and institutions to proactively identify at-risk students, thereby enabling early and tailored instructional interventions. However, there are no suitable publicly available educational datasets for modeling and predicting future reading performance. In this work, we introduce the Enhanced Core Reading Instruction (ECRI) dataset, a novel large-scale longitudinal tabular dataset collected across 44 schools with 6,916 students and 172 teachers. We leverage the dataset to empirically evaluate the ability of state-of-the-art machine learning models to recognize early childhood educational patterns in multivariate and partial measurements. Specifically, we demonstrate a simple self-supervised strategy in which a Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) network is pre-trained over masked inputs to outperform several strong baselines while generalizing over diverse educational settings. To facilitate future developments in precise modeling and responsible use of models for individualized and early intervention strategies, our data and code are available at https://ecri-data.github.io/. Zhongkai Shangguan, Zanming Huang, Eshed Ohn-Bar, Ola Ozernov-Palchik, Derek Kosty, Michael Stoolmiller, Hank Fien |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2023 | Coaching a Teachable StudentabstractWe propose a novel knowledge distillation framework for effectively teaching a sensorimotor student agent to drive from the supervision of a privileged teacher agent. Current distillation for sensorimotor agents methods tend to result in suboptimal learned driving behavior by the student, which we hypothesize is due to inherent differences between the input, modeling capacity, and optimization processes of the two agents. We develop a novel distillation scheme that can address these limitations and close the gap between the sensorimotor agent and its privileged teacher. Our key insight is to design a student which learns to align their input features with the teacher's privileged Bird's Eye View (BEV) space. The student then can benefit from direct supervision by the teacher over the internal representation learning. To scaffold the difficult sensorimotor learning task, the student model is optimized via a student-paced coaching mechanism with various auxiliary supervision. We further propose a high-capacity imitation learned privileged agent that surpasses prior privileged agents in CARLA and ensures the student learns safe driving behavior. Our proposed sensorimotor agent results in a robust image-based behavior cloning agent in CARLA, improving over current models by over 20.6% in driving score without requiring LiDAR, historical observations, ensemble of models, on-policy data aggregation or reinforcement learning. Jimuyang Zhang, Zanming Huang, Eshed Ohn-Bar |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2022 | ASSISTER: Assistive Navigation via Conditional Instruction Generation
Zanming Huang, Zhongkai Shangguan, Jimuyang Zhang, Gilad Bar, Matthew Boyd, Eshed Ohn-Bar |
ECCV (36) | 1 |