Zehao Liu

PhD Student, College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University

📍 State College, PA, US

zml5418[AT]psu.edu

About Me

Zehao Liu is presently a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University, advised by Professor Vasant Honavar. He earned his M.S. and B.Eng. degrees from Southwest Jiaotong University.

His current research interests include post-training for large language models and multi-modal language models, reinforcement learning, on-policy distillation, and AI for healthcare.

📝 Publications and Preprints

• PAC-Bayes Beyond Parameter Space: Behavioral Equivalence, Z-Information, and Exact Complexity Decomposition
  Vasant G. Honavar, Satish Kumar Keshri, Neil Ashtekar, Zehao Liu
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.11465, 2026. [arXiv]
• Restoring the Sweet Spot: Pass-Rate Weighted Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning
  Zehao Liu, Yuanpu Cao, Jinghui Chen, Vasant G. Honavar
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.27765, 2026. [arXiv]
• Skin-R1: Clinical Knowledge-Guided Dermatological Diagnosis Using Vision-Language Models
  Zehao Liu, Weijieying Ren, Jipeng Zhang, Tianxiang Zhao, Jingxi Zhu, Xiaoting Li, Vasant G. Honavar
  accepted to ECCV 2026. [arXiv]
• A Comprehensive Survey of Electronic Health Record Modeling: From Deep Learning Approaches to Large Language Models
  Weijieying Ren, Jingxi Zhu, Zehao Liu, Tianxiang Zhao, Vasant Honavar
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.12774, 2025. [arXiv]
• Self-Supervised Discriminative Representation Learning by Fuzzy Autoencoder
  Wenlu Yang, Hongjun Wang, Yinghui Zhang, Zehao Liu, Tianrui Li
  ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 14(1), 1–18, 2022. [DOI]
• Bilateral Discriminative Autoencoder Model Orienting Co-representation Learning
  Zehao Liu, Hongjun Wang, Wei Chen, Luqing Wang, Tianrui Li
  Knowledge-Based Systems, 245, 108653, 2022. [DOI]

🎖 Honors and Awards

• National Postgraduate Scholarship of China
• Outstanding Graduate Student of Sichuan Province

📖 Education

💬 Academic Service

• Journal Reviewer: Information Sciences, Journal of Big Data

🧑‍🏫 Teaching Experience

• Teaching Assistant, DS 330: Visualization & Visual Analytics, Penn State University
• Teaching Assistant, DS 320: Data Integration & Fusion, Penn State University
• Teaching Assistant, Fundamentals of Computer Programming, Southwest Jiaotong University