Short Bio

Welcome to my homepage! I am currently a research assistant in the AI Thrust of the Information Hub at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), supervised by Prof. Tianxiang Zhao. Previously, I worked as a research assistant at CAIR-HKISI, supervised by Prof. Mingyang Zhao. During my spare time, I helped build a code dataset for MNBVC and helped build the financial RAG system for Likelihood Lab.

My current research focuses on the efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability of AI, including scenarios involving agent and multi-agent systems. Previously, I have worked on benchmarking MLLM performance, fine-tuning domain-specific visual question answering models, and training domain models for image captioning.

News

07/2026 🎉 Zhongtao Rao's work accepted to SIGIR 2026. Congratulations!
04/2026 Joined HKUST(GZ), supervised by Tianxiang Zhao.
11/2024 Graduated from NUS with a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence Systems.
08/2024 Contributed Bitbucket dataset to MNBVC through bitbucket_crawl_mnbvc.
02/2024 Joined CAIR as intern under the supervision of Mingyang Zhao.
08/2023 Joined Likelihood Lab under the supervision of Mingwen Liu, working on RAG data construction, routing, and retrieval.
06/2022 Graduated from Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU), supervised by Xiying Li.

Publications

Structural and Disentangled Adaptation of Large Vision Language Models for Multimodal Recommendation

Zhongtao Rao, Peilin Zhou, Dading Chong, Zhiwei Chen, Shoujin Wang, Nan Tang

SIGIR '26, Melbourne, VIC, Australia · 2026

We propose a structural and disentangled adaptation framework for large vision-language models in multimodal recommendation.

Paper Code

Projects

SAGE: A Self-Evolving Reliable Strategic Reasoning Framework for LLM Game-Playing Agents

Zhiwei Chen, Tianchun Wang, Tianxiang Zhao

Aug 2026 · Strategic reasoning and self-evolving agents

Homepage GitHub

EchoCare: A fully open and generalizable foundation model for ultrasound clinical applications

Hongyuan Zhang, Yuheng Wu, Mingyang Zhao, Zhiwei Chen, Rebecca Li, Fei Zhu, Haohan Zhao, Xiaohua Yuan, Meng Yang, Chunli Qiu, Xiang Cong, Haiyan Chen, Lina Luan, Randolph H.L. Wong, Huai Liao, Colin A Graham, Shi Chang, Guowei Tao, Dong Yi, Zhen Lei, Nassir Navab, Sebastien Ourselin, Jiebo Luo, Hongbin Liu, Gaofeng Meng

Sept 2025 · Open-source foundation model for ultrasound clinical applications

Homepage GitHub Hugging Face arXiv

CURDNet: Contrastive Ultrasound Report Generation with Diversity-Aware Learning

personal project

Aug 2025 · Research blog on diverse ultrasound report generation

Blog Technical report

PatientQA: A Question Answering Benchmark for Patient Diagnosis

personal project

Dec 2024 · Research blog on patient-centered medical QA evaluation

Blog Technical report

Services

Reviewer, AAAI
Reviewer, CIKM