Chunlin Tian

Email: tianclin0212@gmail.com

Open to positions: Faculty / Postdoc / Research Scientist

About

I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (SKL-IOTSC), University of Macau, advised by Prof. Li Li and Prof. Chengzhong Xu (IEEE Fellow). I am currently a Visiting Researcher at the Machine Learning Systems Group, University of Cambridge, working with Prof. Nicholas D. Lane. I also collaborate with Dr. Zhan Shi and Prof. Zhijiang Guo.

My research focuses on building full-stack edge intelligence systems — spanning algorithms, systems, and hardware — for real-world deployment of foundation models under resource constraints.

Efficient Foundation Models for Edge Deployment. [CLONE (ATC'25), HydraLoRA (NeurIPS'24 Oral), EdgeLLM (SoCC'26), FedLLM Survey (TMLR'26)].
Distributed & Collaborative Edge AI Systems. [Floe (TPDS'26), Harmony (MICRO'22), FedRank (ICML'24), SmartSplit (TPDS'24)].
Hardware-Software Co-Design for Real-World AI Applications. [CLONE (ATC'25), FP4-CIM (CICC'25), SutureFormer (MICCAI'26)].

I have published 20+ papers in top-tier journals and conferences, including MICRO, USENIX ATC, TPDS, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, TMLR, SoCC, EMNLP, MICCAI, and SenSys, with several selected for Oral presentations.

News

2026.08 Two papers accepted: GROVE to EMNLP 2026 and SCALEFL to IEEE TPDS 2026.
2026.06 One paper (SutureFormer) accepted to MICCAI 2026.
2026.04 Two papers accepted: EdgeLLM to ACM SoCC 2026 and ChainFed to ACL 2026 (Oral).
2026.02 One paper (Floe) accepted to IEEE TPDS 2026.
2026.01 One survey paper on Federated LLM accepted to TMLR 2026.

Education

University of Macau 08/2022 – Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science (MPDS awardee)
Xi'an Jiaotong University 09/2018 – 06/2022
B.Eng. in Internet of Things (Outstanding Graduate)

Selected Publications

Full publication list

Floe: Federated Specialization for Real-Time LLM-SLM Inference.

Chunlin Tian, Kahou Tam, Yebo Wu, Shuaihang Zhong, Li Li, Nicholas D. Lane, Chengzhong Xu

IEEE TPDS 2026.

CLONE: Customizing LLMs for Efficient Latency-Aware Inference at the Edge.

Chunlin Tian, Xinpeng Qin, Kahou Tam, Li Li, Zijian Wang, Yuanzhe Zhao, Minglei Zhang and Chengzhong Xu

USENIX ATC 2025. [AR: 100/634 = 15.8%]
🏆 Highest-cited paper at ATC that year (1/100).

HydraLoRA: An Asymmetric LoRA Architecture for Efficient Fine-Tuning.

Chunlin Tian, Zhan Shi, Zhijiang Guo, Li Li and Chengzhong Xu

🏆 NeurIPS 2024 Oral. [AR: 61/15671 = Top 0.4%]

Ranking-based Client Imitation Selection for Efficient Federated Learning.

Chunlin Tian, Zhan Shi, Xinpeng Qin, Li Li and Chengzhong Xu

ICML 2024. [AR: 2609/9653 = 27.0%]

Breaking the Memory Wall for Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Model Splitting.

Chunlin Tian, Li Li, Kahou Tam, Yebo Wu, Chengzhong Xu

IEEE TPDS 2024.

HARMONY: Heterogeneity-Aware Hierarchical Management for Federated Learning System.

Chunlin Tian, Li Li, Zhan Shi, Jun Wang and Chengzhong Xu

IEEE/ACM MICRO 2022. [AR: 83/369 = 22.5%]

Professional Services

Conference Reviewer: MICRO (AE), NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, IJCAI, AAAI, ACM MM.
Journal Reviewer: IEEE TPDS, TMC, TPAMI, TCAD, TVLSI, TNNLS, TSN, TKDE, TITS, IOTJ; ACM TIST.

Mentored Students

If you are passionate about research, I warmly invite you to join us on this academic journey.

2026

Yiming Luo, UMAC (B.S.) → UMich (M.Sc. in CSE)

2025

Xuyang Wei, UESTC (B.S.) → UESTC (M.Sc.)
Huanrong Liu, UMAC (M.Sc.) → UMAC (Ph.D.)

2024

Xinpeng Qin, UESTC (B.S.) → THU (M.Sc.)
Shuaihang Zhong, UESTC (B.S.) → NJU (M.Sc.)

2023

Yunqi Li, RPI (B.S.) → UNC (M.Sc.)
Shitian Li, UMAC (B.S.) → NUS (M.Sc.)

Teaching

CISC7203, Database and Data Mining Technologies, UM (Graduate), Spring 2025.
CISC7204, Data Science and Data Visualization, UM (Graduate), Fall 2024.
CISC1001, Programming Science, UM (Undergraduate), Spring 2024.
CISC2001, Computer Organization, UM (Undergraduate), Fall 2023.
CISC7303, Cloud Computing, UM (Graduate), Spring 2023.
CISC2001, Computer Organization, UM (Undergraduate), Fall 2022.