About Me

I am a first-year M.S. student in Computer Science at UC San Diego, advised by Prof. Hao Zhang, and I hold a B.S. from ShanghaiTech University advised by Prof. Kewei Tu. My research lies at the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning Systems. I am particularly passionate about designing efficient architectures for Long-Context Modeling and exploring the frontiers of World Models to bridge system efficiency with model capability.

Currently, I focus on scalable training and inference for generative models. I am the lead author of FlashMHF, where I proposed a novel Multi-Head FFN architecture backed by IO-aware Triton/CUDA kernels. Additionally, as a core contributor to FastVideo in Hao AI Lab, I am working on new model aggregation and optimized kernel implementations to accelerate video generation systems.

Looking ahead, I aim to extend my work on FlashMHF to broader LLM backbones and delve deeper into World Models within the FastVideo framework. I am also actively exploring retrieval-based methods and Continual Learning to solve the challenges of long-context understanding in foundation models.

Research Interests

  • Natural Language Processing
  • World Models
  • Long context modeling and MLsys

Publications

Flash Multi-Head Feed-Forward Network

Flash Multi-Head Feed-Forward Network

Minshen Zhang*, Xiang Hu*, Jianguo Li, Wei Wu, Kewei Tu

arXiv Preprint, 2025

We propose Flash Multi-Head FFN (FlashMHF), a novel architecture replacing standard FFNs in Transformers. Backed by IO-aware Triton/CUDA kernels and dynamic sub-networks, FlashMHF reduces peak memory by 3-5x and accelerates inference while improving performance over SwiGLU.

News

Oct 2025 Started as Graduate Research Assistant at UC San Diego, working with Prof. Hao Zhang on efficient video generation.
Sep 2025 Began Master's program in Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.
Jul 2025 Joined Alibaba Ant Group as Machine Learning Engineer and Project Leader.
Jun 2025 Graduated from ShanghaiTech University with B.Eng. in Computer Science.

Education

University of California, San Diego

Sep 2025 - Jan 2027 (Expected)

Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering

La Jolla, CA

University of California, Berkeley

Aug 2023 - Jan 2024

Exchange Student, EECS Department

Berkeley, CA

ShanghaiTech University

Sep 2021 - Jun 2025

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Technology

Shanghai, China

Projects

Enhancing 3D Character Generation

Enhancing 3D Character Generation with ControlNet and LoRA

Congrong Xu, Zhanhe Shi, Minshen Zhang, Qingcheng Zhao

EECS 182/282A | Deep Neural Networks, UC Berkeley, 2023

A project exploring enhanced 3D character generation techniques using ControlNet and LoRA for improved control and quality in generative models.

CUDA/C++ Parallel Image Rendering

CUDA/C++ Parallel Image Rendering

Minshen Zhang

Personal Project, 2023

Built a C++ path tracer supporting Lambertian, metal, dielectric, and emissive materials. Implemented motion blur, depth of field, and volumetric effects. Accelerated rendering via CUDA parallelization and importance sampling, achieving ~200× speedup vs. single-threaded CPU baseline.

NERF Neural Network

NERF Neural Network

Minshen Zhang

Personal Project, 2023

Built a NERF rendering pipeline by understanding Camera Intrinsics & Extrinsics and Volumetric Rendering. Trained and validated neural model on RTX4090 using open-source multi-perspective image datasets.

Honors & Awards

2025 Outstanding Graduate of ShanghaiTech University
2024 Outstanding Student, ShanghaiTech University
2024 Teaching Assistant, CS100 Computer Programming, ShanghaiTech University
2022 Outstanding Student, ShanghaiTech University