About

Seeking tenure-track faculty positions · Expected graduation May 2027

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Old Dominion University, advised by Prof. Lusi Li. My research centers on energy-based models for robust representation learning, with applications to multi-view clustering, semantic communication, and AI security — including the robustness of vision-language pre-trained models under adversarial perturbation.

I am broadly interested in building learning systems that stay reliable when data is incomplete, noisy, or adversarial.

Selected Publications

Method figure for ReT-UAP
INFFUS

ReT-UAP: Rethinking Multi-Surrogate Universal Adversarial Perturbations on Vision-Language Pre-trained Models

Z. Wang, J. Li, Y. Du, R. Ning, J. Li, D. Takabi, L. Li

Information Fusion, 104913 · 2026

Method figure for Not All, but the Right Ones
TNNLS

Not All, but the Right Ones: Energy-Guided Representation Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

Z. Wang, J. Li, Y. Du, R. Ning, S. Hao, D. Takabi, L. Li

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems · 2026

System overview for SemCom-UAP
IEEE CNS

SemCom-UAP: Universal Adversarial Perturbations Against Cross-Modal Retrieval in Semantic Communications

Z. Wang, Y. Du, J. Li, R. Ning, S. Hao, D. Takabi, L. Li

IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS) · 2026

Method figure for the AAAI oral paper
AAAI

Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering via Hierarchical Imputation and AlignmentOral

Y. Du, Z. Wang, J. Li, R. Ning, L. Li

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 40(25) · 2026

Method figure for MICA
NN

Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Multi-level Imputation and Contrastive Alignment

Z. Wang, Y. Du, Y. Wang, R. Ning, L. Li

Neural Networks, vol. 181, 106851 · 2025

Method figure for Energy-based Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering
ACM MM

Energy-based Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

Z. Wang, Y. Du, R. Ning, L. Li

ACM International Conference on Multimedia, pp. 1686–1694 · 2025

Method figure for ECSC
MILCOM

ECSC: Energy-Calibrated Semantic Communication

Z. Wang, Y. Du, R. Ning, D. Takabi, L. Li

IEEE Military Communications Conference, pp. 1359–1364 · 2025

Method figure for SEMI
INFFUS

Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Structure Exploration and Missing-View Inference

Z. Wang, L. Li, X. Ning, W. Tan, Y. Liu, H. Song

Information Fusion, vol. 103, 102123 · 2024

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science (in progress)

Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA · Advisor: Prof. Lusi Li

Aug 2022 – Present

B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering

University of Detroit Mercy, Detroit, MI

Jun 2018

B.S. in Electrical and Information Engineering

China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China

Aug 2018

Service

Journal Reviewer

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems · IEEE Transactions on Image Processing · IEEE Internet of Things Journal · IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics · IEEE Transactions on Multimedia · ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data · Neural Networks (Elsevier) · Information Fusion (Elsevier) · Image and Vision Computing (Elsevier) · Expert Systems with Applications (Elsevier)

Conference Reviewer

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence · ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM)

Visitors