About Me


Hi, I am a PhD student at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), working on machine learning and computer vision under the supervision of Prof. Amir Zamir at VILab. Currently, I'm most interested in uncovering System-2–like thinking abilities in vision and multimodal models, for example, understanding how a model can leverage additional compute at test time to "think more". More broadly, I am curious about how System-1–style generalizable representation learning and System-2–style reasoning and adaptation can be effectively integrated, and how such capabilities might relate to and differ from human cognition.

Previously, I completed my master's studies at ShanghaiTech, working with Prof. Xuming He. I studied semantic segmentation under distribution shifts and explored topics like test-time adaptation, domain generalization and uncertainty estimation.

News


  • 08/2025: I passed my PhD candidacy exam titled “Visual Test-Time Scaling via Search”! Slides are available here.
  • 06/2025: I was recognized as an Outstanding Reviewer for CVPR 2025 (awarded to the top 5% of reviewers).
  • 02/2025: Our Joint Inference paper was accepted to ICLR 2025.
  • 09/2024: I started my PhD studies at EPFL with the EDIC fellowship. Excited for this new journey!

Selected Publications


2025

Generation by Search: Scaling Test-Time Compute for Autoregressive Image Generation
Zhitong Gao, Parham Rezaei, Ali Cy, Natasa Jovanovi, Mingqiao Ye, Jesse Allardice, Afshin Dehghan, Roman Bachmann*, Oguzhan Fatih Kar*, Amir Zamir*
Under review.
Large (Vision) Language Models are Unsupervised In-Context Learners
Artyom Gadetsky*, Andrei Atanov*, Yulun Jiang*, Zhitong Gao, Ghazal Hosseini Mighan, Amir Zamir, Maria Brbić
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025

2024

Generalize or Detect? Towards Robust Semantic Segmentation Under Multiple Distribution Shifts
Zhitong Gao, Bingnan Li, Mathieu Salzmann, Xuming He
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

2023

ATTA: Anomaly-aware Test-Time Adaptation for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Segmentation
Zhitong Gao, Shipeng Yan, Xuming He
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023
Modeling Multimodal Aleatoric Uncertainty in Segmentation with Mixture of Stochastic Experts
Zhitong Gao, Yucong Chen, Chuyu Zhang, Xuming He
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023

2021

Superpixel-guided Iterative Learning from Noisy Labels for Medical Image Segmentation
Shuailin Li*, Zhitong Gao*, Xuming He
International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2021
Note: * indicates equal contribution.
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Services


Conference Reviewer

  • CVPR 2023, 2024, 2025 (Outstanding Reviewer)
  • NeurIPS 2023, 2024, 2025
  • ICLR 2024, 2025, 2026

Teaching Assistant