Chunlin Tian

Ph.D. Candidate, University of Macau
Visiting Researcher, University of Cambridge

Email: yc27402@um.edu.mo  /  ct720@cam.ac.uk

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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.
• Distributed & Collaborative Edge AI Systems.
• Hardware-Software Co-Design for Real-World AI Applications.

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

News

• 2026.04 One paper (EdgeLLM) accepted to ACM SoCC 2026.
• 2026.04 One paper (ChainFed) accepted to ACL 2026.
• 2026.03 Attended AI Forum at CUHK(SZ) and SLAI, and received the Best Presentation Award.
• 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

For a complete list, please see my Google Scholar profile.

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%]

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

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

NeurIPS 2024. [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.

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.

FedGCS: A Generative Framework for Efficient Client Selection in Federated Learning via Gradient-based Optimization.

Zhiyuan Ning*, Chunlin Tian*, Meng Xiao, Wei Fan, Pengyang Wang, Li Li, Pengfei Wang and Yuanchun Zhou

IJCAI 2024. [AR: 791/5651 = 14.0%]

A Survey on Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models.

Yebo Wu, Chunlin Tian, Jingguang Li, He Sun, KaHou Tam, Zhanting Zhou, Haicheng Liao, Jing Xiong, Zhijiang Guo, Li Li, Chengzhong Xu

TMLR 2026.

Learn to Select: Efficient Cross-device Federated Learning via Reinforcement Learning.

Chunlin Tian, Zhan Shi and Li Li

ICLR 2023, Tiny.

FedHybrid: Breaking the Memory Wall of Federated Learning via Hybrid Tensor Management.

Kahou Tam, Chunlin Tian, Li Li, Haikai Zhao, Chengzhong Xu

ACM SenSys 2024. [AR: 58/313 = 18.5%]

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: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, IJCAI, AAAI, ACM MM.
• Journal Reviewer: IEEE TPDS, TMC, TPAMI, TCAD, TVLSI, TNNLS, TSN, TKDE, TITS, IOTJ; ACM TIST.
• External Reviewer: MICRO, HPCA, ASPLOS.

Mentored Students

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

• Xinpeng Qin, UESTC (B.S.) → Tsinghua University (M.S.)
• Shuaihang Zhong, UESTC (B.S.) → Nanjing University (M.S.)
• Xuyang Wei, UESTC (B.S.) → UESTC (M.S.)
• Yunqi Li, RPI (B.S.) → UNC (M.S.)
• Shitian Li, UMAC (B.S.) → NUS (M.S.)

Awards

• 10/2024, NeurIPS 2024 Scholar Award
• 2022– 2026, UM Macao PhD Scholarship
• 06/2022, Outstanding Graduate, Xi'an Jiaotong University
• 2019–2021, Outstanding Student, Xi'an Jiaotong University
• 10/2020, ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest (ROBOCON), First Prize

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.