Researcher profile

Zhe Zhao

Zhe Zhao contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

3 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Systematic Survey on Large Language Models for Algorithm Design

Algorithm design is crucial for effective problem-solving across various domains. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has notably enhanced the automation and innovation within this field, offering new perspectives and promising solutions. In just a few years, this integration has yielded remarkable progress in areas ranging from combinatorial optimization to scientific discovery. Despite this rapid expansion, a holistic understanding of the field is hindered by the lack of a systematic review, as existing surveys either remain limited to narrow sub-fields or with different objectives. This paper seeks to provide a systematic review of algorithm design with LLMs. We introduce a taxonomy that categorises the roles of LLMs as optimizers, predictors, extractors and designers, analyzing the progress, advantages, and limitations within each category. We further synthesize literature across the three phases of the algorithm design pipeline and across diverse algorithmic applications that define the current landscape. Finally, we outline key open challenges and opportunities to guide future research. To support future research and collaboration, we provide an accompanying repository at: https://github.com/FeiLiu36/LLM4AlgorithmDesign.

preprint2026arXiv

AQuaUI: Visual Token Reduction for GUI Agents with Adaptive Quadtrees

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have recently emerged as promising backbones for GUI-agent models, where high-resolution GUI screenshots are introduced to the prompts at each iteration step. However, these screenshots exhibit highly non-uniform spatial information density: large regions may carry little information and are visually homogeneous, while key text and icons may require high visual fidelity. Existing approaches to this problem either require additional training or rely on attention-based token compression, ignoring the structured layout and spatial redundancy of GUI screenshots. To fill the gap, this paper proposes AquaUI, a training-free inference-time token reduction method for GUI agent models that utilizes the non-uniform information density in screenshots. AQuaUI constructs an adaptive quadtree on each screenshot input and keeps one representative merged token per leaf of the quadtree. AQuaUI preserves the spatial positions of retained tokens throughout the pipeline to ensure that all position-encoding stages remain consistent. To further improve temporal consistency across multi-step GUI interactions, we propose a conditional quadtree algorithm that leverages the continuity between consecutive screenshots within a single request. Specifically, it refines the current quadtree using previous quadtrees as references, helping preserve fine-grained regions across static or mildly shifted GUI states. We implement AQuaUI on state-of-the-art GUI agent models and conduct experiments on standard grounding and navigational benchmarks. AQuaUI consistently shows improved accuracy-efficiency trade-offs over prior baselines. Notably, on GUI-Owl-1.5-32B-Instruct, AQuaUI achieves up to 13.22% speedup and 29.52% fewer visual tokens while retaining 99.06% of full-token performance, suggesting that the spatial redundancy of GUI screenshots can be exploited at inference without retraining.

preprint2026arXiv

Closing the Reality Gap: Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Deployment for Dexterous Force-Based Grasping and Manipulation

Human-like dexterous hands with multiple fingers offer human-level manipulation capabilities, but training control policies that can directly deploy on real hardware remains difficult due to contact-rich physics and imperfect actuation. We close this gap with a practical sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) framework that utilizes dense tactile feedback combined with joint torque sensing to explicitly regulate physical interactions. To enable effective sim-to-real transfer, we introduce (i) a computationally fast tactile simulation that computes distances between dense virtual tactile units and the object via parallel forward kinematics, providing high-rate, high-resolution touch signals needed by RL; (ii) a current-to-torque calibration that eliminates the need for torque sensors on dexterous hands by mapping motor current to joint torque; and (iii) actuator dynamics modeling to bridge the actuation gaps with randomization of non-ideal effects such as backlash, torque-speed saturation. Using an asymmetric actor-critic PPO pipeline trained entirely in simulation, our policies deploy directly to a five-finger hand. The resulting policies demonstrated two essential skills: (1) command-based, controllable grasp force tracking, and (2) reorientation of objects in the hand, both of which were robustly executed without fine-tuning on the robot. By combining tactile and torque in the observation space with effective sensing/actuation modeling, our system provides a practical solution to achieve reliable dexterous manipulation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of controllable grasping on a multi-finger dexterous hand trained entirely in simulation and transferred zero-shot on real hardware.