Siru Zhong
Ph.D. Student
Data Science & Analytics
Guangzhou, China
Huawei, XPENG, Tencent

Siru Zhong is a Ph.D. student in Data Science at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Guangzhou Campus, since Spring 2025, supervised by Prof. Yuxuan Liang, with co-supervision from Prof. Yang Yue and Prof. Yangqiu Song. He previously obtained his M.Phil. degree from the same university in 2024 and his B.S. degree in Computer Science from HFUT in 2022.

Currently, Siru is a Research Intern at Huawei 2012 Labs (supervised by Dr. Hao Xu) and collaborates with Squirrel AI (supervised by Dr. Qingsong Wen, Head of AI and Chief Scientist). Prior to that, he interned at XPENG (supervised by Dr. Cheng Lu, Director of the Visual Imaging Team at Autonomous Driving Center) and worked as a full-time Software Engineer at Tencent (2022–2023).

His research interests lie in Multimodal Spatio-Temporal Data Intelligence, including modeling, forecasting, and decision-making for complex spatiotemporal systems. He welcomes collaborations with researchers and practitioners in related areas.

Education Background
  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)
    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)
    Ph.D. in Data Science & Analytics
    Feb. 2025 - Jan. 2028
  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)
    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)
    M.Phil. in Data Science & Analytics
    Aug. 2023 - Jan. 2025
  • Hefei University of Technology
    Hefei University of Technology
    B.Eng. in Computer Science & Information Engineering
    Sep. 2018 - Jul. 2022
Working Experience
  • Huawei 2012 Labs
    Huawei 2012 Labs
    Research Intern, Spatio-temporal Foundation Models
    Feb. 2025 - Now
  • XPENG ADC
    XPENG ADC
    Research Intern, Multimodal Perception in AD
    May. 2024 - Aug. 2024
  • Tencent CloudIDE
    Tencent CloudIDE
    Software Engineer & Intern, Cloud DevTools
    Jun. 2021 - May. 2023
News
2025
One paper on Urban Heat Island Effect Forecasting was accepted to KDD 2025.
May 15
One paper on Multimodal Time Series Forecasting was accepted to ICML 2025.
May 01
I was invited to serve as a reviewer for ACM MM 2025.
Apr 26
One tutorial on Multimodal Learning for Spatio-Temporal Data Mining was accepted to ACM MM 2025 Tutorials.
Feb 28
I started to cooperate with Huawei 2012 Labs, leading the project of Spatio-temporal knowledge fusion.
Feb 06
I started my PhD studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou).
Feb 05
I received the Runner-Up Prize in the 2024 HKUST(GZ) DSA Excellent Research Award.
Jan 27
2024
Two papers on Urban Indicator Prediction and Air Quality Inference were accepted to AAAI 2025.
Dec 10
I successfully defended my MPhil thesis in Data Science and Analytics at HKUST(GZ).
Nov 25
I was invited to serve as a reviewer for ICLR 2025.
Aug 23
One paper on Urban Multimodal Image-Text Retrieval was accepted to ACM MM 2024.
Jul 18
I joined XPENG as a Research Intern focusing on multimodal research in autonomous driving scenarios.
May 14
Two papers on Spatio-Temporal Prediction and Neural Networks were accepted to IJCAI 2024.
May 14
One paper on LLM-Enhanced Urban Region Profiling was accepted to WWW 2024.
Jan 23
2023
I started my MPhil studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou).
Aug 24
2022
I officially joined Tencent as a Software Engineer!
Jul 04
I graduated from Hefei University of Technology with Outstanding Thesis Award.
Jun 05
2021
I completed my three-month internship at Tencent and received a SP return offer.
Sep 14
Selected Publications (view all )
Fine-grained Urban Heat Island Effect Forecasting: A Context-aware Thermodynamic Modeling Framework
Fine-grained Urban Heat Island Effect Forecasting: A Context-aware Thermodynamic Modeling Framework

Xingchen Zou, Weilin Ruan, Siru Zhong, Yuehong Hu, Yuxuan Liang

ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2025), Toronto, Canada Poster

[Paper]

Fine-grained Urban Heat Island Effect Forecasting: A Context-aware Thermodynamic Modeling Framework
Fine-grained Urban Heat Island Effect Forecasting: A Context-aware Thermodynamic Modeling Framework

Xingchen Zou, Weilin Ruan, Siru Zhong, Yuehong Hu, Yuxuan Liang

ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2025), Toronto, Canada Poster

[Paper]

Time-VLM: Exploring Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Time Series Forecasting
Time-VLM: Exploring Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Time Series Forecasting

Siru Zhong, Weilin Ruan, Min Jin, Huan Li, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025), Vancouver, Canada Poster

[Code] [Paper]

Time-VLM: Exploring Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Time Series Forecasting
Time-VLM: Exploring Multimodal Vision-Language Models for Augmented Time Series Forecasting

Siru Zhong, Weilin Ruan, Min Jin, Huan Li, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025), Vancouver, Canada Poster

[Code] [Paper]

UrbanVLP: A Multi-Granularity Vision-Language Pre-Trained Model for Urban Indicator Prediction
UrbanVLP: A Multi-Granularity Vision-Language Pre-Trained Model for Urban Indicator Prediction

Xixuan Hao, Wei Chen, Yibo Yan, Siru Zhong, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025), Philadelphia, America Poster

[Code] [Paper]

UrbanVLP: A Multi-Granularity Vision-Language Pre-Trained Model for Urban Indicator Prediction
UrbanVLP: A Multi-Granularity Vision-Language Pre-Trained Model for Urban Indicator Prediction

Xixuan Hao, Wei Chen, Yibo Yan, Siru Zhong, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025), Philadelphia, America Poster

[Code] [Paper]

AirRadar: Inferring Nationwide Air Quality in China with Deep Neural Networks
AirRadar: Inferring Nationwide Air Quality in China with Deep Neural Networks

Qiongyan WANG, Yutong Xia, Siru Zhong, Weichuang Li, Yuankai Wu, Shi Fen Cheng, Junbo Zhang, Yu Zheng, Yuxuan Liang

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025), Philadelphia, America Poster

[Code] [Paper]

AirRadar: Inferring Nationwide Air Quality in China with Deep Neural Networks
AirRadar: Inferring Nationwide Air Quality in China with Deep Neural Networks

Qiongyan WANG, Yutong Xia, Siru Zhong, Weichuang Li, Yuankai Wu, Shi Fen Cheng, Junbo Zhang, Yu Zheng, Yuxuan Liang

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025), Philadelphia, America Poster

[Code] [Paper]

UrbanCross: Enhancing Satellite Image-Text Retrieval with Cross-Domain Adaptation
UrbanCross: Enhancing Satellite Image-Text Retrieval with Cross-Domain Adaptation

Siru Zhong, Xixuan Hao, Yibo Yan, Ying Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Yuxuan Liang

ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2024), Melbourne, Australia Poster

[Code] [Paper]

UrbanCross: Enhancing Satellite Image-Text Retrieval with Cross-Domain Adaptation
UrbanCross: Enhancing Satellite Image-Text Retrieval with Cross-Domain Adaptation

Siru Zhong, Xixuan Hao, Yibo Yan, Ying Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Yuxuan Liang

ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2024), Melbourne, Australia Poster

[Code] [Paper]

Spatio-Temporal Field Neural Networks for Air Quality Inference
Spatio-Temporal Field Neural Networks for Air Quality Inference

Yutong Feng, Qiongyan Wang, Yutong Xia, Junlin Huang, Siru Zhong, Kun Wang, Shifen Cheng, Yuxuan Liang

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024), Jeju Island, South Korea Poster

[Code] [Paper]

Spatio-Temporal Field Neural Networks for Air Quality Inference
Spatio-Temporal Field Neural Networks for Air Quality Inference

Yutong Feng, Qiongyan Wang, Yutong Xia, Junlin Huang, Siru Zhong, Kun Wang, Shifen Cheng, Yuxuan Liang

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024), Jeju Island, South Korea Poster

[Code] [Paper]

Predicting Parking Availability in Singapore with Cross-Domain Data: A New Dataset and A Data-Driven Approach
Predicting Parking Availability in Singapore with Cross-Domain Data: A New Dataset and A Data-Driven Approach

Huaiwu Zhang, Yutong Xia, Siru Zhong, Kun Wang, Zekun Tong, Qingsong Wen, Roger Zimmermann, Yuxuan Liang

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024), Jeju Island, South Korea Poster

[Code] [Paper] [Dataset]

Predicting Parking Availability in Singapore with Cross-Domain Data: A New Dataset and A Data-Driven Approach
Predicting Parking Availability in Singapore with Cross-Domain Data: A New Dataset and A Data-Driven Approach

Huaiwu Zhang, Yutong Xia, Siru Zhong, Kun Wang, Zekun Tong, Qingsong Wen, Roger Zimmermann, Yuxuan Liang

International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024), Jeju Island, South Korea Poster

[Code] [Paper] [Dataset]

UrbanCLIP: Learning Text-enhanced Urban Region Profiling with Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining from the Web
UrbanCLIP: Learning Text-enhanced Urban Region Profiling with Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining from the Web

Yibo Yan, Haomin Wen, Siru Zhong, Wei Chen, Haodong Chen, Qingsong Wen, Roger Zimmermann, Yuxuan Liang

International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2024), Singapore Oral

[Code] [Paper]

UrbanCLIP: Learning Text-enhanced Urban Region Profiling with Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining from the Web
UrbanCLIP: Learning Text-enhanced Urban Region Profiling with Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining from the Web

Yibo Yan, Haomin Wen, Siru Zhong, Wei Chen, Haodong Chen, Qingsong Wen, Roger Zimmermann, Yuxuan Liang

International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2024), Singapore Oral

[Code] [Paper]

Honors & Awards
  • Runner-Up Prize for DSA Excellent Research Award, HKUST(GZ)
    2024
  • Best Project Award (1st/15) in Data Science Computing, HKUST(GZ)
    2023
  • Outstanding Student (Top 10%) in Red Bird Summer Camp, HKUST(GZ)
    2023
  • iCode Certification of R&D Engineering Competency Evaluation, Tencent
    2022
  • Silver Award (2nd/12) in Code World Program, Tencent
    2022
  • Outstanding Student Award (8th/100) in New Employee Training, Tencent
    2022
  • Outstanding Graduation Thesis Award (Top 2%), HFUT
    2022
  • First Prize (Top 10) in CSDN Technology Blogger Competition
    2020
Extracurricular Activities
  • Greater Bay Area Science Forum attendee, Guangzhou, China
    2024
  • ACM Multimedia Conference attendee, Melbourne, Australia
    2024
  • China National Computer Conference attendee, Yiwu, China
    2024
  • HKUST-GZ System Hub Welcome Party performer, Guangzhou, China
    2023
  • Tencent New Year Gala performer, Shenzhen, China
    2023
  • HFUT Chorus member, Hefei, China
    2018-2022
  • HFUT External Relations Department member, Hefei, China
    2018-2019