To further strengthen the talent discovery and cultivation system of the Chinese Institute of Electronics (CIE) and to support Ph.D. students' academic development and research practice in fields related to large-scale models, the CIE, in collaboration with Tencent, has launched the "CIE–Tencent Ph.D. Research Incentive Program (Hunyuan Large Model Special Program)." Selected student members will receive a research grant of RMB 100,000 per person, as well as access to research practice platforms and other forms of support.
This year marks the third edition of the program. A total of 329 applications were received. After formal review, online peer review, and defense-based evaluation, 44 Ph.D. students were finally selected. Among them, Zhao Chen, a Ph.D. student of the Class of 2024 from our school, has been successfully admitted to the program.
Profile of the Selected Candidate
Zhao Chen is a 2024 Ph.D. student at Nanjing University, advised by Prof. Tai Ying. He has received the CIE–Tencent Hunyuan Scholar award, the National Scholarship, and the Outstanding Graduate Student Award. His research covers computer vision and multimodal generation/understanding. He has published 30+ papers at top venues, including 10 first-authored CCF-A/Zone 1 papers, and has 1,000+ Google Scholar citations, with one ESI Highly Cited Paper. He serves as a reviewer for top conferences/journals and received the CVPR 2025 Outstanding Reviewer Award. He was also selected for Meituan's Beidou Talent Program and contributed to the LongCat-Video foundation model series, with his work deployed in production models.
Supervisor Profile
Tai Ying is an Associate Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor at Nanjing University. A recipient of the Gusu Leading Talent Program and the NJU Zijin Scholar Award, he leads projects supported by NSFC, Jiangsu NSF, and industry partners including China Mobile, VIVO, Meituan, CCF-Ant, and Huawei. Formerly an Expert Researcher at Tencent YouTu Lab, his research centers on multimodal visual perception and generation. He has published 100+ papers in top venues with 18,600+ citations, including two highly cited first-authored papers (>3,000 and >2,200 citations). His work has been deployed in Tencent Meeting, Tencent Cloud, and China Mobile products, with 50+ granted patents. He has received the Jiangsu Provincial Science and Technology Award (First Prize, 2021), the CSIG Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Nomination Award (2018), and led teams to three NTIRE championships (2020–2021). He serves as Area Chair for top conferences and as Associate Editor for Image and Vision Computing, and is listed among Stanford's Top 2% Scientists (Career-Long Impact).
