Mellon M. Zhang

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

I am a Machine Learning PhD student at Georgia Tech and a graduate research assistant in the Trustworthy Robotics Lab, advised by Professor Glen Chou. My research focuses on enabling reliable real-world deployment of perception-driven robotic systems and foundation models. I work across three areas: real-time inference and latency coordination, world modeling and spatiotemporal reasoning, and closed-loop uncertainty-aware perception–action systems. My current interests include end-to-end (E2E) networks and vision-language-action (VLA) models for robotics and autonomous driving.

Previously, I was a MSECE student at Georgia Tech, working on efficient and hardware-friendly 3D perception algorithms with Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay. I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. In my undergrad years, I explored dense associative memories for robust image classification as part of a summer undergraduate research fellowship experience at Georgia Tech. I was also a research assistant and Rose Hills Fellow in the UC Berkeley Knight Lab, working with Professor Robert Knight on circuit-tracing large language foundation models from a neuroscience perspective.

news

Nov 25, 2025

Check out our work on MAPS, now out on arXiv! We propose an effective new framework for maintaining broad generalizability during VLM-to-VLA transfer. Big thanks to all my collaborators for pulling off this project! Also check out the project site!

Jul 25, 2025

My ongoing work in active uncertainty mitigation for LiDAR perception will be supported in part by the Lambda Research Grant!

Jul 22, 2025

I began my PhD in machine learning at Georgia Tech.

Apr 28, 2025

Our work on Polar Hierarchical Mamba was accepted to the 4DV: Modeling the Dynamic World workshop @ CVPR 2025.

Aug 1, 2023

I started my MS at Georgia Tech.

May 13, 2023

I graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Computer Science.

Mar 30, 2022

I was awarded a Berkeley SURF Rose Hills Fellowship.

Aug 26, 2021

I received the 2nd prize at the Georgia Tech Summer Research Symposium.

May 24, 2021

I began my SURE fellowship at Georgia Tech.