JC STEM FACT Lab @ HKUST

Meet Our Team

World-class researchers pushing the boundaries of science and engineering

Principal Investigator

Yuan Xie

Chair Professor

Fang Professor of Engineering | Chair Professor | IEEE/ACM/AAAS Fellow

Research Assistant Professor

Entropy Xu (徐策羽) obtained his Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department at Duke University. His research focuses on the intersection of computer architecture and machine learning, with two main directions: designing efficient computer architectures for machine learning algorithms and developing machine learning algorithms for efficient computer architectures. His interests include Machine Learning Hardware Accelerator, Large Language Models, Compression and Quantization, and AI for EDA. HKUST Official Profile Page

Postdoctoral Researchers

Chen Bai

Postdoctoral Researcher

Chen Bai's research interests include computer architecture and electronic design automation. He received best paper awards from ICCAD 2021 and ISPD 2024.

Xueqi Li

Postdoctoral Researcher

My research focuses on compute-in-memory architectures and chips, domain-specific architectures, and hardware-software co-design.

Bangyan Wang

Postdoctoral Researcher

Bangyan Wang (王邦彦) is a Postdoc in FACT Lab. His current research interests focus on applying AI and formal methods to hardware verification and generation. In the past, his major focus was on computer architecture, including multicore scheduling problems and instruction extension design for semi-general-purpose scenarios.

Jun Xia

Postdoctoral Researcher

Jun Xia's research interests focus on edge-cloud intelligence systems and trustworthy AI.

Edge-cloud intelligence systems Trustworthy AI

Weikai Xu

Postdoctoral Researchers

Weikai Xu (徐伟凯) is a visiting student from School of Integrated Circuits, Peking University. His doctoral research has primarily focused on emerging device-based in-memory computing and searching, as well as hardware-algorithm co-design for AI acceleration. To date, he has published 15 first-author papers in top-tier conferences and journals, including IEDM, VLSI, DAC, ESSERC, DATE, and EDL, and holds 22 granted or pending patents related to electron devices and their applications in AI. He has received IEEE EDS PhD Student Fellowship (3 awardees worldwide), Best Paper Award at EDTM 2025, Best Paper Award 1st Prize at CSTIC 2022, CAST Young Talent Support Program for Doctoral Students, and his recently accepted work has been nominated for Best Student Paper in Neuromorphic and Novel Computing at IEDM 2025.

Hao Yu

Postdoctoral Researcher

Hao Yu (于浩) is a postdoctoral researcher at HKUST, working with Prof. Yuan Xie. His research interests are automated code generation, with focuses on hardware and software code generation. He obtained his Ph.D at Peking University, under the supervision of Tao Xie and Ying Li, master degree from Peking University, and bachelor from Tianjin Normal University.

Yiyang Yuan

Postdoctoral Researcher

Yiyang Yuan (袁易扬) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at FACT Lab, HKUST. His research interests include Computing-in-Memory, RISC-V, AI Accelerator, and Embodied Intelligence.

Computing-in-Memory RISC-V AI Accelerator

Shirui Zhao

Postdoc Researcher

My research sits at the intersection of AI, computer architecture, and silicon implementation. I design, tape out, and evaluate energy-efficient chips for edge AI that address real system requirements beyond raw neural-network throughput.

Neuro-Symbolic AI RISC-V Probabilistic Machine Learning

Zeyu Zhu

Postdoctoral Researcher

His research interests are efficient AI computing, with a focus on large language models, graph neural networks, and hardware/software co-design.

Zhenhua Zhu

Postdoctoral Researcher

Zhenhua Zhu （朱振华） received his B.S. and Ph.D. (with honor) degrees from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, China, in 2018 and 2024, respectively. Currently, he is serving as a postdoc researcher in the Department of ECE, HKUST and Department of EE, Tsinghua University. His research interests include Processing-In-Memory, Near Memory Computing, computer architecture, EDA, etc. He has published/accepted 50 academic papers in IEEE TCAD, DAC, ISCA, MICRO, ICCAD, ASPLOS, and DATE, with Google Scholar citations more than 1,500. He has received the China Computer Federation (CCF) Fault Tolerant Computing (FTC) Outstanding Achievements Award, the Best Paper Honorable Mention in HPCA 2025 (Top 0.5%), the Best Paper Nomination in DATE 2023, and the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award of Tsinghua University. He is selected for Tsinghua University’s “Shuimu Scholar” Program and the Department of Electronic Engineering’s “Chuanxin Scholar” Program. He is the principal investigator of Youth Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). He serves as a reviewer for IEEE TCAD, IEEE TVLSI, ACM TODAES, ACM TECS, CASES, GLSVLSI, ISVLSI, and AICAS. He also serves as the TPC secretary of ASP-DAC 2025.

Ph.D. Students

Xin Fan

Ph.D. Student

Xin Fan (范心) is currently a second-year Ph.D. student. Her research focuses on interconnects and communication, with a particular interest in data centers and scale-up systems.

Zihan Lin

Ph.D. Student

I am interested in 3D vision and embodied AI. I hope my research could be applied in real-world robots and make them smarter.

Qi Liu

Ph.D. Student

Qi Liu (刘奇) is a Ph.D. Student at HKUST. He has rich experiences in crypto-accelerator/inference model accelerator. He is also proficient in FPGA backend optimization. His research currently focus on formal validation on hardware.

Ruyi Song

Ph.D. Student

Ruyi Song (宋如意) is a first-year PhD student, having completed both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Zhejiang University. Her current research focuses on 3D integrated circuits.

Xiangfeng Sun

Ph.D. Student

Xiangfeng Sun is an Ph.D. student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology specializing in computer architecture and VLSI. He aims for his research to be both meaningful and interesting.

Hongyi Wang

Ph.D. Student

Hongyi Wang is currently a master student at Tsinghua University. His research interests include hardware-software co-design and FPGA-based accelerators. Hongyi Wang is set to join FACT Lab in 2025 to pursue his doctoral degree.

Yiran Xia

Ph.D. Student

Yiran Xia （夏一然） is a PhD student (2025-) working at the intersection of computer architecture and artificial intelligence. His research centers on building specialized hardware and system support for AI applications like embodied AI and large language models, while also investigating AI-assisted EDA design for agile chip development.

Zhaohui Yang

Ph.D. Student

My research interests focus on quantum computer system design and fault-tolerant quantum computing, to bridge the gap between algorithms and bottom-layer physical devices.

Jiangnan Yu

Ph.D. Student

My research focuses on the relationship between Hardware Accelerators and High-Performance Computing (HPC).

Incoming Students

Ningzhi Ai

Incoming Ph.D. Student

Ningzhi Ai (艾宁智) is an incoming Ph.D. student. He is dedicated to researching more powerful prefetchers and branch predictors to enhance general-purpose computing performance. He also focus on developing more efficient hardware architectures for AI-related algorithms, including LLMs and embodied AI.

Yanqin Li

Incoming Ph.D. Student

Yanqin LI (李燕琴) is a visiting internship master student from Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Wenhao Sun

Incoming Ph.D. Student

Wenhao Sun （孙文昊） is currently a final year's master student at ICT, CAS. His primary research interests lie in architectural support for embodied AI and robotic systems.

Renati Tuerhong

Incoming Ph.D. Student

Renati Tuerhong (热纳提·吐尔洪) is an incoming Ph.D. student at Peking University, where he is currently completing his bachelor's degree. His research interests include VLSI design and Computer Architecture, with a focus on emerging applications such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Embodied AI.

Ruiyun Zhang

Incoming Ph.D. Student

My research interests focus on fault-tolerant quantum computing and quantum compiler design, especially for continuous-variable systems, to bridge the gap between resource theory, magic-state engineering, and scalable quantum hardware.

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Recent Publications

Ceyu Xu, Xiangfeng Sun, Weihang Li, Chen Bai, Bangyan Wang, Mengming Li, Zhiyao Xie, Yuan Xie (2026). PF-LLM: Large Language Model Hinted Hardware Prefetching. Proceedings of the 31th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems 🏆Best Paper Award.

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Chen Bai, Xin Fan, Zhenhua Zhu, Wei Zhang, Yuan Xie (2025). AccelStack: A Cost-Driven Analysis of 3D-Stacked LLM Accelerators. 2025 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD).

PDF Slides Code

Hongyi Wang, Zhenhua Zhu, Tianchen Zhao, Yunfei Xiang, Zehao Wang, Jincheng Yu, Huazhong Yang, Yuan Xie, Yu Wang (2025). REACT3D: Real-time Edge Accelerator for Incremental Training in 3D Gaussian Splatting based SLAM Systems. Proceedings of the 58th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture®.

Ceyu Xu, Yongji Wu, Xinyu Yang, Beidi Chen, Matthew Lentz, Danyang Zhuo, Lisa Wu Wills (2025). LLM. 265: Video Codecs are Secretly Tensor Codecs. Proceedings of the 58th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture® 🏆Best Paper Award 🏆Micro Top Picks.

Slides

Ling Liang, Zhen Gu, Fahong Zhang, Zhaohui Chen, Zhirui Li, Xin Fan, Dimin Niu, Meng LI, Zhiyong Li, Zongwei Wang, others (2025). Matrix: Multi-Cipher Structures Dataflow for Parallel and Pipelined TFHE Accelerator. ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization.

Tianchan Guan, Yijin Guan, Zhaoyang Du, Jiacheng Ma, Boyu Tian, Zhao Wang, Teng Ma, Zheng Liu, Yang Kong, Yuan Xie, others (2025). MemTunnel: a CXL-based Rack-Scale Host Memory Pooling Architecture for Cloud Service. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.

Cong Li, Yihan Yin, Xintong Wu, Jingchen Zhu, Zhutianya Gao, Dimin Niu, Qiang Wu, Xin Si, Yuan Xie, Chen Zhang, others (2025). H2-LLM: Hardware-Dataflow Co-Exploration for Heterogeneous Hybrid-Bonding-based Low-Batch LLM Inference. Proceedings of the 52nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 🏆Best Paper Award.

Guyue Huang, Hao Li, Le Qin, Jiayi Huang, Yangwook Kang, Yufei Ding, Yuan Xie (2025). TRACI: Network Acceleration of Input-Dynamic Communication for Large-Scale Deep Learning Recommendation Model. Proceedings of the 52nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

Jianbo Dong, Bin Luo, Jun Zhang, Pengcheng Zhang, Fei Feng, Yikai Zhu, Ang Liu, Zian Chen, Yi Shi, Hairong Jiao, others (2025). Enhancing Large-Scale AI Training Efficiency: The C4 Solution for Real-Time Anomaly Detection and Communication Optimization. 2025 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA).

Yiquan Chen, Zhen Jin, Yijing Wang, Yi Chen, Jiexiong Xu, Hao Yu, Jinlong Chen, Wenhai Lin, Kanghua Fang, Keyao Zhang, others (2025). NVMePass: A Lightweight, High-performance and Scalable NVMe Virtualization Architecture with I/O Queues Passthrough. 2025 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA).

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Lab News & Updates

FACT Lab Collaborates with Intel to Establish Joint Laboratory Focusing on High-Efficiency Intelligent Computing

February 5, 2026

FACT Lab at HKUST has partnered with Intel to establish the “HKUST-Intel Joint Laboratory.” This three-year research initiative will focus on high-efficiency near-memory computing architectures to address performance and energy efficiency challenges in artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Led by Prof. Xie Yuan, the joint laboratory aims to innovate through hardware and software co-design, paving the way for the future of intelligent devices and sustainable AI systems. The collaboration was formalized in a signing ceremony attended by senior officials from both HKUST and Intel, underscoring their commitment to advancing green technological innovation and sustainability.

February 5, 2026

Prof. Xie Recognized with 2025 Chinese Institute of Electronics Science and Technology Award

January 26, 2026

Professor Yuan Xie has been honored with the 2025 Chinese Institute of Electronics Science and Technology Award for the project “High-Energy-Efficiency Circuit Representation and Optimization Methods for Large-Scale Sparse Matrix Computation.” This prestigious recognition, achieved in collaboration with researchers from Tsinghua and Peking University, highlights the laboratory’s commitment to advancing energy-efficient computing technologies.

January 26, 2026

FACT Lab Celebrates Professor Yuan Xie's 2025 CCF Overseas Science and Technology Award

September 29, 2025

FACT lab is pleased to announce that Professor Yuan Xie has been awarded the 2025 “CCF Overseas Science and Technology Award” by the China Computer Federation (CCF). This prestigious award recognizes his outstanding contributions to integrated circuit chip design, computer architecture, and electronic design automation. Professor Xie’s work in translating research into industrial applications and nurturing talent through educational initiatives has significantly advanced the field of computer science in China.

September 29, 2025

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