Sheng Zhou (周晟) | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

About Me

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) from Mar. 2026 to the present, working with Prof. Yanda Meng.
From Sep. 2024 to Aug. 2025, I studied at National University of Singapore (NUS) as a visiting student under the guidance of Dr. Junbin Xiao, Prof. Angela Yao, and Prof. Tat-Seng Chua.
From Aug. 2023 to Aug. 2024, I studied at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) for one year under the guidance of Prof. Xun Yang.
I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Hefei University of Technology (HFUT) through a direct M.S.–Ph.D. program from Sep. 2020 to Dec. 2025, supervised by Prof. Meng Wang and closely collaborated with Prof. Dan Guo.

Research

My research focuses on developing AI systems that can understand complex visual environments and effectively bridge vision and language. My research interests include Video Understanding, Visual Question Answering, and Visual Grounding.

I currently focus on Video Understanding and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for real-world and healthcare applications, with an emphasis on efficiency, interpretability, and trustworthy AI. My goal is to build intelligent systems that can perceive and reason about the real world, support human decision-making, and enable effective human–AI interaction.

I am actively seeking Research Interns and Visiting Students with backgrounds in Computer Vision, NLP, or Multimodal Learning.

News

📌 [Pinned] My group at KAUST is actively looking for fully funded visiting students/interns (free housing, flight ticket, medical insurance, plus 1000 USD/month for stipend). If you are interested, please contact me.

[Jul. 2026] Invited as Area Chair for the Multimodal Large Language Models for Unified Comprehension and Generation (MUCG) Workshop at ECCV 2026.
[Jun. 2026] One paper is accepted by ECCV’26. 🎉
[Apr. 2026] Invited as Area Chair for the Any-to-Any Multimodal Learning (A2A-ML) Workshop at CVPR 2026.
[Feb. 2026] One paper is accepted by CVPR’26. 🎉
[Nov. 2025] Successfully defended my Ph.D. 🎓 Thesis: Research on Scene Text-Driven Visual Question Answering.
[May. 2025] Our work EgoTextVQA will be presented at the Egocentric Vision (EgoVis) Workshop and Vision-based Assistants in the Real-World (VAR) Workshop @ CVPR 2025!
[May. 2025] One paper is accepted by IEEE TMM’25. 🎉
[Feb. 2025] One paper is accepted by CVPR’25. 🎉
[Feb. 2025] I am honored to receive the Tat-Seng Chua Scholarship.
[Sep. 2024] I will be a visiting student at NUS for one year, collaborating with Dr. Junbin Xiao.
[Jan. 2024] One paper is accepted by ACM TOMM’24. 🎉
[Sep. 2023] One paper is accepted by IEEE TIP’23. 🎉
[Jul. 2023] Started a study at USTC supervised by Prof. Xun Yang.

Publications

* Equal contribution; # Core contributor; † Corresponding author

ECCV

SafeGuard: A Multi-Agent Perception-Reasoning Framework for Social-Risk AI-Generated Video Detection

Wenlin Wu*, Sheng Zhou*, Peipei Song, Wenhao Wang, Junbin Xiao†, Xun Yang†

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2026.

Paper Code Dataset

CVPR

RealUnify: Do Unified Models Truly Benefit from Unification? A Comprehensive Benchmark

Yang Shi#, Yuhao Dong#, Yue Ding#, Yuran Wang#, Xuanyu Zhu#, Sheng Zhou#, Wenting Liu#, Haochen Tian#, Rundong Wang#, Huanqian Wang, Zuyan Liu, Bohan Zeng, Ruizhe Chen, Qixun Wang, Zhuoran Zhang, Xinlong Chen, Chengzhuo Tong, Bozhou Li, Qiang Liu, Haotian Wang†, Wenjing Yang, Yuanxing Zhang†, Pengfei Wan, YiFan Zhang†, Ziwei Liu†

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026.

Paper Code Dataset

CVPR

EgoTextVQA: Towards Egocentric Scene-Text Aware Video Question Answering

Sheng Zhou, Junbin Xiao†, Qingyun Li, Yicong Li, Xun Yang, Dan Guo, Meng Wang, Tat-Seng Chua, Angela Yao

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.

Paper Code Dataset Project Page

TMM

Scene-Text Grounding for Text-Based Video Question Answering

Sheng Zhou, Junbin Xiao†, Xun Yang†, Peipei Song, Dan Guo†, Angela Yao, Meng Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), 2025.

Paper Code Dataset

TOMM

Graph Pooling Inference Network for Text-based VQA

Sheng Zhou, Dan Guo†, Xun Yang†, Jianfeng Dong, Meng Wang†

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications (TOMM), 2024.

Paper Code

TIP

Exploring Sparse Spatial Relation in Graph Inference for Text-Based VQA

Sheng Zhou, Dan Guo†, Jia Li, Xun Yang†, Meng Wang†

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2023.

Paper Code

Services

Area Chair: MUCG Workshop @ ECCV 2026 · A2A-ML Workshop @ CVPR 2026
Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS 2026 · CVPR 2026 · ECCV 2026 · ACM MM 2025, 2026 · EMNLP 2026 · AAAI 2027 · IJCNN 2025, 2026, 2027
Journal Reviewer: IEEE TIP · IEEE TCSVT · ACM TOMM · Information Fusion · Pattern Recognition · Neurocomputing · JKSU-CIS

Selected Honors and Awards

[2025.02] Tat-Seng Chua Scholarship
[2022 - 2025] First Class Academic Scholarship (three times)
[2020 - 2022] Second Class Academic Scholarship (two times)
[2020] Outstanding Graduate of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Hunan Province
[2016 - 2019] National Encouragement Scholarship (three times)

Last updated: 2026.10