zhan8023[at]umn[dot]edu

Zaifu Zhan

(占在福)

Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Creative, Curious, Honest, Passionate

Welcome! I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, with an anticipated completion in 2026. Prior to this, I earned a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2021 and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Beijing Jiaotong University in 2018. I am currently co-advised by Prof.Zhang at the Zhang Research Group and by Prof. Elia.

Research Interests: I am passionate about machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. I enjoy appling state-of-the-art techniques to tackle real-world problems. Through my work, I aim to develop innovative tools and solutions that empower industries and advance scientific knowledge. Let’s connect and explore how we can collaborate! 😊

Skills:
Programming: Python(Proficient), MATLAB(Proficient), SQL, R, C/C++, Java
Frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, Hugging Face, vLLM
Math: Linear Algebra, Probability & Statistics, Convex and integer optimization, Common ML Algorithms, DL basics
Data Processing: Pandas, NumPy, Data Cleaning, Data Visualization (Matplotlib, Seaborn)
Others: Linux Bash, Shell, Git, GitHub, Slurm, LaTeX, Processing, Jupyter

Reviewer Service:
Journal: Nature Communications(if=18.1 2026), npj Digital Medicine(if=18.1 2026), npj Precision Oncology, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, JMIR Medical Informatics, International Journal of Computers and Applications, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Report, Discover Computing, Discover Education, JAMIA Open, PeerJ Computer Science, Digital Health, Journal of King Saud University Computer and Information Sciences, BMC Medical Informatics, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, BMC Medical Education, BMC Medical Research Methodology, Communications Medicine, Information Processing and Management, Expert Systems With Applications, International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, Informatics in Medicine Unlocked, Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, European Journal of Cancer, Psychology, Health & Medicine, Discover Artificial Intelligence, Discover Informatics, Cluster Computing, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, BMC Cardiovascular Disorders
Conference: AMIA Annual Symposium’25, ACL-SRW’25, ICNLSP’25 (Program Committee), Amplify Informatics Conference’26, IEEE ICHI’26, AMIA Annual Symposium’26, ICNLSP’26

news

Aug 21, 2026	One paper Improving Latent Reasoning in LLMs via Soft Concept Mixing was accepted by EMNLP main 2026.
Aug 17, 2026	One paper ChestPheNoT: Deployable, Auditable Label-Status-Evidence Extraction from Radiology Reports was accepted by IEEE Healthcom’26.
May 28, 2026	One paper was accepted by JAMIA. Paper title is “Benchmarking Information Extraction of Physical Activity from Electronic Health Record with Large Language Models: An NLP Pipeline and Comparative Evaluation”
May 16, 2026	Two papers were accepted by KDD 2026 AI4Sciences Track: Salient-Q: A Saliency-Guided Vision-Language Framework for Medical Image De-Identification Completing Multimodal Biomedical Knowledge Graphs with Schema-Aware Modality Imputation and Alignment
May 15, 2026	My paper “To Reason or Not to: Selective Chain-of-Thought in Medical Question Answering” just got accepted at AMIA 2026 Annual Symposium
Apr 30, 2026	My co-authored review paper “Deep learning enabled decision support systems in epilepsy surgery a scoping review” just got accepted at npj Health Systems
Apr 25, 2026	I’m excited to share that I’ve been selected as a recipient of the 2026–27 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Minnesota. Grateful for the support and recognition, and looking forward to focusing on my dissertation work in the coming year.
Mar 26, 2026	One long paper, one short paper and one workshop paper were accepted by ICHI 2026. Distilling GPT-4o to Enhance Medical Reasoning in Small Language Models (Oral) Can Large Language Models Self-Correct in Medical Question Answering? An Exploratory Study (Poster) An Underexplored Frontier: Large Language Models for Rare Disease Patient Education and Communication – A scoping review (Workshop oral)
Mar 17, 2026	One paper Let large language models judge each other: multi-agent peer-reviewed reasoning for medical question answering just got accepted at Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
Mar 12, 2026	One paper Retrieval-augmented in-context learning for multimodal large language models in disease classification just got accepted at Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Mar 05, 2026	I am happy to announce that I will be joining Zoom Company in summer 2026 as AI research intern for 12 weeks. So exciting!!!
Feb 24, 2026	My paper EPEE: towards efficient and effective foundation models in biomedicine was accepted by npj Health Systems.
Feb 23, 2026	I was invited by Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association to write a letter in response to my previous MMRAG paper. Now the letter is available: “Letter to the Editor in response to “Optimizing example-selection in retrieval-augmented biomedical in-context learning: reflections on the MMRAG study””.
Feb 05, 2026	A paper I co-authored has been accepted by npj Digital Medicine (If=15.1): “CancerLLM: A Large Language Model in Cancer Domain”.
Jan 17, 2026	One paper was accepted by Journal of Biomedical Informatics (If=4.5): “PEER: Towards reliable and efficient inference via Patience-Based Early Exiting with Rejection”.
Nov 21, 2025	A paper I co-authored has been accepted by npj Digital Medicine (If=15.1): “Automating Expert-Level Medical Reasoning Evaluation of Large Language Models”.
Nov 15, 2025	I attended the AMIA 2025 Annual Symposium at Atlanta, and did an oral presentation for my paper: “Improving electronic health record processing of large language models via retrieval-augmented generation: A case study on dietary supplements”
Oct 14, 2025	A paper I co-authored has been accepted by Science Advance (If=12.5): “Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models in Biomedical NLP: Application, Robustness, and Self-Awareness”, after over one year review process and two revisions.
Oct 06, 2025	A paper I co-authored has been accepted by npj Digital Medicine (If=15.1): “Uncertainty-Aware Large Language Models for Explainable Disease Diagnosis”.
Sep 24, 2025	A review paper “Mitigating Ethical Issues for Large Language Models in Oncology: A Systematic Review” I co-authored just got published in JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics.
Jul 12, 2025	I accepted to ba a reviewer for Applied Artificial Intelligence.
Jul 11, 2025	MMRAG paper was accepted to JAMIA. Happy!
Jun 06, 2025	My paper was accepted to AMIA 2025 Annual Symposium.
Jun 06, 2025	I accepted to be a reviewer for ACL-SRW 2025.
May 16, 2025	A review paper I co-authored was accepted to npj Artificial Intelligence.
May 16, 2025	A paper I co-authored was accepted to ACL Main Conference.
May 05, 2025	I attended the NAACL conference and did a poster presentation for my accepted paper.
Apr 11, 2025	Just received the offer!!! I will be join Atlassian in this coming summer as an AI research intern. See my linkedin post.
Mar 07, 2025	The preprint of our paper EPEE: Towards Efficient and Effective Foundation Models in Biomedicine is available on arXiv.
Feb 22, 2025	The preprint of our paper MMRAG: Multi-Mode Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Large Language Models for Biomedical In-Context Learning is available on arXiv and has been submitted to JAMIA.
Feb 19, 2025	I collaborated on the paper Benchmarking of Large Language Models for the Dental Admission Test which was published in the Science Partner Journal Health Data Science.
Jan 23, 2025	The paper Towards Better Multi-task Learning: A Framework for Optimizing Dataset Combinations in Large Language Models was accepted to NAACL 2025 !!!
Jan 17, 2025	One paper was accepted by Journal of Biomedical Informatics (If=4.5): “PEER: Towards reliable and efficient inference via Patience-Based Early Exiting with Rejection”.
Jan 12, 2025	“RAMIE: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-task Information Extraction with Large Language Models on Dietary Supplements” was published in JAMIA.
Dec 31, 2024	Paper “RAMIE: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-task Information Extraction with Large Language Models on Dietary Supplements” was accepted to JAMIA. Exciting!!!
Dec 18, 2024	Released a pre-print version of paper: Towards Better Multi-task Learning: A Framework for Optimizing Dataset Combinations in Large Language Models
Dec 14, 2024	Start developing my personal webpage