Chengzhi Mao

Brief Bio

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. My research spans large (vision) language models, computer vision, and AI trustworthiness.

Previously, I have been a Research Scientist at Google, a Core Faculty Member at MILA, and an Assistant Professor at McGill. I completed my Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2023, advised by Carl Vondrick and Junfeng Yang, and my BS at Tsinghua University in 2018.

I am actively recruiting highly self-motivated Ph.D. students, research interns, and postdocs. If you’re interested, please email me with your CV.

News

• Oct 2025: Giving an invited talk at ICCV 2025.
• Sep 2024: Serving as Area Chair for ICLR 2026.
• Sep 2025: Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
• May 2025: Serving as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2025.
• Oct 2024: Serving as Area Chair for ICLR 2025.
• Apr 2024: Received the Discovery Grant for NSERC.
• Feb 2024: CVPR 2024 Highlight (top 2%).

PhD Students and Postdocs

Selected Papers

Latent Adversarial Reflection for LLM Jailbreaking

Ran Li, Hao Wang, Chengzhi Mao

NeurIPS 2025 — paper

Video Diffusion Models Excel at Tracking Similar-Looking Objects Without Supervision

Chenshuang Zhang, Kang Zhang, Joon Son Chung, In So Kweon, Junmo Kim, Chengzhi Mao

NeurIPS 2025 — paper

EDITLORD: Learning Code Transformation Rules for Code Editing

Weichen Li, Albert Jan, Baishakhi Ray, Junfeng Yang, Chengzhi Mao, Kexin Pei

ICML 2025 — paper

Diversity Helps Jailbreak Large Language Models

Weiliang Zhao, Daniel Ben-Levi, Wei Hao, Junfeng Yang, Chengzhi Mao

NAACL 2025 (Oral) — paper

SelfIE: Self-Interpretation of Large Language Model Embeddings

Haozhe Chen, Carl Vondrick, Chengzhi Mao

ICML 2024 — project

Raidar: geneRative AI Detection viA Rewriting

Chengzhi Mao, Carl Vondrick, Hao Wang, Junfeng Yang

ICLR 2024 — paper

Doubly Right Object Recognition: A Why Prompt for Visual Rationales

Chengzhi Mao, Revant Teotia, Amrutha Sundar, Sachit Menon, Junfeng Yang, Xin Wang, Carl Vondrick

CVPR 2023 — arXiv / dataset / code

Shadows Shed Light on 3D Objects

Ruoshi Liu, Sachit Menon, Chengzhi Mao, Dennis Park, Simon Stent, Carl Vondrick

CVPR 2023 — arXiv / dataset / code

Real-Time Neural Voice Camouflage

Mia Chiquier, Chengzhi Mao, Carl Vondrick

ICLR 2022 (Oral) — arXiv / code / Science / talk

Discrete Representations Strengthen Vision Transformer Robustness

Chengzhi Mao, Lu Jiang, Mostafa Dehghani, Carl Vondrick, Rahul Sukthankar, Irfan Essa

ICLR 2022 — arXiv / code / cite / talk

Adversarial Attacks are Reversible with Natural Supervision

Chengzhi Mao, Mia Chiquier, Hao Wang, Junfeng Yang, Carl Vondrick

ICCV 2021 — arXiv / code / cite / talk

Generative Interventions for Causal Learning

Chengzhi Mao, Amogh Gupta*, Vikram Nitin*, Baishakhi Ray, Shuran Song, Junfeng Yang, Carl Vondrick

CVPR 2021 — arXiv / code / cite / talk

Teaching

• TBD

Contact

Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University
Email: chengzhi.mao@rutgers.edu