Hao Zhang

Hao Zhang

Assistant Professor

HDSI, CSE (affiliate)

UC San Diego

Email: haozhang AT ucsd.edu

I am an Assistant Professor at Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and Department of Computer Science and Engineering (affiliate) at UC San Diego. I lead the Hao AI Lab at UCSD. I cofounded LMNet.ai (2023), and we have joined force with Snowflake since November 2023. During 2016 - 2021, I worked for the ML platform startup Petuum Inc. Here is a short Bio.

Prospective students and postdocs: I am recruiting new PhD students and postdocs. We also have openings for MS/undergrad research interns. Please check out this page to see how to get involved.

Research

I study the intersection area of machine learning and systems. I am equally interested in designing strong, efficient, and secure machine learning models and algorithms, and in building scalable, practical distributed systems that can support real-world machine learning workloads.

Our Lab (@haoailab) develops open models, algorithms, and systems to democratize the access of large models. I also co-founded and run the non-profit LMSYS Org (@lmsysorg) which maintains the popular LLM evaluation Chatbot Arena and the widely adopted LLM serving framework vLLM.

Current Projects

Some of my research have been developed and maintained as open source software:

  • Lookahead Decoding: A parallel LLM decoding method that trades FLOPs for fewer decoding steps.
  • FastChat: An open platform for training, serving, and evaluating Large Language Models.
  • vLLM: A high-throughput and memory-efficient inference engine for LLMs.
  • Vicuna: A series of popular open-source LLM chatbots available in 7B/13B/33B sizes.
  • Alpa: Training large-scale neural networks with auto parallelization. Scales to 1000+ GPUs.
  • Ray Collective: CPU/GPU collective communication primitives on Ray.
  • AutoDist: Automatic data-parallel training on TensorFlow.
  • DyNet: The Dynamic Neural Network Toolkit.
  • Poseidon: Parameter server on distributed GPUs.

Students and Postdocs

Current Members

Alumni

Recent Talks

Experience

  • Assistant Professor, UC San Diego, 2023 - Present
  • Software Engineer, Snowflake, 2023 - Present
  • Postdoc, UC Berkeley, 2021 - 2023
  • Director of Scalable Machine Learning, Petuum Inc, 2016 - 2021
  • Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University, 2014 - 2020 (on leave 2016 - 2020)