Changchang Sun (孙畅畅)

Ph.D. Student

CVM Lab @ UIC
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois Chicago
851 S. Morgan St., 11th Floor SEO, Chicago, IL 60607, U.S.A

Email: sunchangchang123@gmail.com and csun47@uic.edu

About Me

I am a final-year Ph.D. student (expected graduation: May 2027) in the Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory (CVMLab) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), supervised by Prof. Yan Yan. Before joining UIC, I studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) (Aug. 2021-Dec. 2024, transferred to UIC with my advisor), supervised by Prof. Yan Yan, and was a visiting student (Aug. 2023-May 2025) at Michigan State University under the supervision of Prof. Sijia Liu. Before that, I received my Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Technology from Shandong University in 2021 and 2018, supervised by Prof. Xuemeng Song and co-supervised by Prof. Liqiang Nie. I have also interned as a research scientist at TikTok (Summer 2026) and Pony.ai (Summer 2025).

My research interests include:

Generative AI: dance-to-music generation with latent diffusion models;
Trustworthy ML: machine unlearning, adversarial attack;
Computer Vision: human-object interaction detection;
Multimedia Retrieval: cross-modal hashing.

I am currently on the job market for academic and industrial positions. Please see my CV and Google Scholar. Feel free to reach out if you think I could be a good fit.

News []

2026.05: One first-author paper (SODA) is accepted by FG 2026, and one co-author paper (MVI-Bench) is accepted by ICML 2026.
2026.05: Start my research internship at TikTok, San Jose, CA, working on AIGC content generation and video color grading.
2026.02: One co-author paper is accepted by CVPR 2026.
2025.11: Deliver an invited talk at UIC on machine unlearning (Forget Vectors), invited by Prof. Lu Cheng.
2025.07: One first-author paper is accepted by ICIP Workshop 2025, and one co-author paper is accepted by ACM MM 2025.
2025.05: Start my research internship at Pony.ai, Fremont, CA, working on 3D object detection.
2025.02: One first-author paper is accepted by CVPR 2025.
2025.01: Start my new journey at UIC, Chicago, IL.
2024.04: One first-author paper is accepted by ICMR 2024.
2023.12: One co-author paper is accepted by AAAI 2024.
2023.02: Two co-author papers are accepted by CVPR 2023.
2022.05: One first-author paper is accepted by CVPR Workshop 2022.
2021.09: Start my new journey at IIT, Chicago, IL.
2019.05: One first-author paper is accepted by SIGIR 2019.

Publications

Preprints

Forget Vectors at Play: Universal Input Perturbations Driving Machine Unlearning in Image Classification
Changchang Sun, Ren Wang, Yihua Zhang, Jinghan Jia, Jiancheng Liu, Gaowen Liu, Yan Yan, Sijia Liu
arXiv BibTeX

First-Authored Publications

SODA: Semantic-Cohesive Knowledge Distillation for Deep Cross-Modal Hashing
Changchang Sun, Vickie Chen, Yan Yan
IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), 2026
arXiv BibTeX

Enhancing Dance-to-Music Generation via Negative Conditioning Latent Diffusion Model
Changchang Sun, Gaowen Liu, Charles Fleming, Yan Yan
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
PDF BibTeX

Tie-Breaking Conflict-Ease Cross-Modal Hashing
Changchang Sun, Jialie Shen, Gaowen Liu, Aihua Zheng, Yan Yan
IEEE International Conference on Image Processing Workshops (ICIP W), 2025
PDF BibTeX

DCT: Divide-and-Conquer Transformer Network with Knowledge Transfer for Query-driven HOI Detection
Changchang Sun, Bin Duan, Hugo Latapie, Gaowen Liu, Yan Yan
ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), 2024
PDF BibTeX

Deep Normalized Cross-modal Hashing with Bi-direction Relation Reasoning
Changchang Sun, Hugo Latapie, Gaowen Liu, Yan Yan
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPR W), 2022
PDF BibTeX

Supervised Hierarchical Cross-modal Hashing
Changchang Sun, Xuemeng Song, Fuli Feng, Wayne Xin Zhao, Hao Zhang, Liqiang Nie
International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2019
PDF Code BibTeX

Co-Authored Publications

Consistent Instance Field for Dynamic Scene Understanding
Junyi Wu, Van Nguyen Nguyen, Benjamin Planche, Jiachen Tao, Changchang Sun, Zhongpai Gao, Zhenghao Zhao, Anwesa Choudhuri, Gengyu Zhang, Meng Zheng, Feiran Wang, Terrence Chen, Yan Yan, Ziyan Wu
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026
arXiv BibTeX

MVI-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Robustness to Misleading Visual Inputs in LVLMs
Huiyi Chen, Jiawei Peng*, Dehai Min*, Changchang Sun*, Kaijie Chen, Yan Yan, Xu Yang, Lu Cheng (* equal contribution)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
arXiv Code BibTeX

Visual Grounding with Attention-Driven Constraint Balancing
Weitai Kang, Luowei Zhou, Junyi Wu, Changchang Sun, Yan Yan
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2025
arXiv BibTeX

SSDL: Sensor-to-Skeleton Diffusion Model with Lipschitz Regularization for Human Activity Recognition
Nikhil Sharma, Changchang Sun, Zhenghao Zhao, Anne Hee Hiong Ngu, Hugo Latapie, Yan Yan
International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (MMM), 2025
PDF BibTeX

WaveFormer: Wavelet Transformer for Noise-Robust Video Inpainting
Zhiliang Wu, Changchang Sun, Hanyu Xuan, Gaowen Liu, Yan Yan
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024
PDF BibTeX

Mining and Unifying Heterogeneous Contrastive Relations for Weakly-Supervised Actor-Action Segmentation
Bin Duan, Hao Tang, Changchang Sun, Ye Zhu, Yan Yan
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024
PDF BibTeX

Flow-Guided Deformable Alignment Network with Self-Supervision for Video Inpainting
Zhiliang Wu, Kang Zhang, Changchang Sun, Hanyu Xuan, Yan Yan
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023
PDF BibTeX

Deep Stereo Video Inpainting
Zhiliang Wu, Changchang Sun, Hanyu Xuan, Yan Yan
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023
PDF BibTeX

Semi-supervised Video Inpainting with Cycle Consistency Constraints
Zhiliang Wu, Hanyu Xuan, Changchang Sun, Weili Guan, Kang Zhang, Yan Yan
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023
PDF BibTeX

MM-FRec: Multi-modal Enhanced Fashion Item Recommendation
Xuemeng Song, Chun Wang, Changchang Sun, Shanshan Feng, Min Zhou, Liqiang Nie
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2023
PDF Code BibTeX

Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation with Cycle-resemblance Attention
Hao Ding, Changchang Sun, Hao Tang, Dawen Cai, Yan Yan
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2023
PDF BibTeX

Divide-and-conquer Completion Network for Video Inpainting
Zhiliang Wu, Changchang Sun, Hanyu Xuan, Kang Zhang, Yan Yan
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2022
PDF BibTeX

C3CMR: Cross-Modality Cross-Instance Contrastive Learning for Cross-Media Retrieval
Junsheng Wang, Tiantian Gong, Zhixiong Zeng, Changchang Sun, Yan Yan
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2022
PDF BibTeX

User Diverse Preference Modeling by Multimodal Attentive Metric Learning
Fan Liu, Zhiyong Cheng, Changchang Sun, Yinglong Wang, Liqiang Nie, Mohan Kankanhalli
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2019
arXiv BibTeX

Work Experience

TikTok, San Jose, CA, Research Intern, AIGC content generation and video color grading, May 2026-Aug. 2026.
Pony.ai, Fremont, CA, Research Intern, 3D object detection, May 2025-Aug. 2025.

Invited Talks

Forget Vectors at Play: Universal Input Perturbations Driving Machine Unlearning in Image Classification, University of Illinois Chicago, invited by Prof. Lu Cheng, Nov. 2025.

Selected Awards & Honors

CVPR 2022 Student Travel Award for in-person conference at New Orleans, USA, 2022.
SIGIR 2019 Student Travel Award for in-person conference at Paris, France, 2019.
Excellent Postgraduate, Shandong University, 2019.
Dean Scholarship, School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, 2019.

Academic Services

Conference Reviewer

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR): 2024, 2025, 2026
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS): 2024, 2025, 2026
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR): 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI): 2024, 2026
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV): 2024
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV): 2026, 2027
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM): 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024
ACM Web Conference (WWW): 2025

Journal Reviewer

Conference Organizing Committee

Finance Chair, ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), 2025.

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant, UIC: Mathematical Foundations of Computing, Fall 2026 (Prof. Drishika Dey and Prof. Mitch Theys).
Teaching Assistant, UIC: Mathematical Foundations of Computing, Spring 2026 (Prof. Omar Ibrahim).
Teaching Assistant, UIC: Introduction to Machine Learning, Fall 2025 (Prof. Hao Chen).
Teaching Assistant, IIT: Advanced Machine Learning, Spring 2022 (Prof. Yan Yan).
Teaching Assistant, Shandong University: Fundamentals of Electric Circuits, 2019-2021.

Mentoring

Zhiliang Wu (Ph.D., Nanjing University of Science and Technology), Jan. 2022-Aug. 2024, outcomes: CVPR'23 (×2), AAAI'24, TCSVT'22.
Nikhil Sharma (Ph.D., Illinois Institute of Technology), Jul. 2024-Dec. 2024, outcome: MMM'25.
Hao Ding (Ph.D., Illinois Institute of Technology), Jul. 2023-Oct. 2023, outcome: WACV'23.

Last Updated on September 11, 2026
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