Tong Zhao

👋 About

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at Zhejiang University and Westlake University, advised by Prof. Chi Zhang in the Westlake AGI Lab. My research focuses on efficient diffusion generation — making diffusion and flow models faster to sample while preserving generation quality. Before that, I received my B.Eng. from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, where I was part of the Yingcai Honors College and worked with Prof. Yong Deng on uncertainty and information theory.

I grew up in Qujing, Yunnan — a laid-back city in southwest China blessed with a mild, spring-like climate all year round. If you visit, do try our local comfort food: xiaoguo erkuai (small-pot rice cake) and zheng ersi (steamed rice noodles). 🍜

Off the clock, I play a lot of basketball 🏀 and I'm an avid gamer 🎮 — CS2 (Perfect World rank A) and Honor of Kings (3rd place in UESTC's e-sports tournament).

📰 News

📝 Publications

* denotes equal contribution.

BudCache teaser
ICML 2026

Budget-Constrained Step-Level Diffusion Caching

Mingkun Lei, Tong Zhao, Liangyu Yuan, Chi Zhang

Fixes the compute budget in advance and searches for the step-level cache policy that best preserves output quality — controllable acceleration up to 3.7× on FLUX.1-dev.

🎓 Education

Zhejiang University Westlake University
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Zhejiang University & Westlake University
Advisor: Prof. Chi Zhang
2025 – present
UESTC Yingcai Honors College
B.Eng. in Computer Science
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Yingcai Honors College
GPA 3.98/4.00 · Rank 1/137
2021 – 2025

🛠️ Academic Service

🏆 Honors & Awards