PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Long Chen

Also known as 陈隆, 陳隆

Long Chen is a computer vision and machine learning researcher at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where his work spans multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation. He earned a B.Eng. from Dalian University of Technology in 2015 and a Ph.D. from Zhejiang University in 2020, publishing SCA-CNN for image captioning in 2017, a counterfactual critic for scene graph generation in 2019, and counterfactual sample synthesis for visual question answering in 2020. Baidu Scholar listed him among its 2021 Global Top 100 Chinese Rising Stars in AI. After a postdoctoral position in Shih-Fu Chang's DVMM Lab at Columbia University, he joined HKUST in 2023, and 2025 brought AAAI New Faculty Highlights, an IJCAI Early Career Spotlight, and an NSFC Young Scientists Fund award. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and an associate editor of IEEE TPAMI and IEEE TIP.

Timeline

  1. 2015–2020

    Doctorate at Zhejiang University

    He earns a B.Eng. degree from Dalian University of Technology in 2015. At Zhejiang University's DCD Lab, he completes a Ph.D. in computer science in 2020 under Jun Xiao, and as a visiting student he works with Hanwang Zhang at Nanyang Technological University and with Tat-Seng Chua at the National University of Singapore.

  2. 2017

    SCA-CNN for image captioning

    His first-author paper SCA-CNN appears at CVPR 2017 with Hanwang Zhang, Jun Xiao, Tat-Seng Chua, and others. The network adds spatial and channel-wise attention to a convolutional network for image captioning and is evaluated on Flickr8K, Flickr30K, and MSCOCO.

  3. 2019–2020

    Counterfactual learning for vision

    His ICCV 2019 oral paper proposes Counterfactual critic Multi-Agent Training (CMAT), a multi-agent policy gradient method for scene graph generation that is validated on Visual Genome. At CVPR 2020, he introduces Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing (CSS), which builds counterfactual training samples for visual question answering and reaches 58.95% on VQA-CP v2.

  4. 2021

    Baidu Scholar rising-star list

    Baidu Scholar includes him in its 2021 Global Top 100 Chinese Rising Stars in AI.

  5. By 2023

    Postdoc at Columbia, then HKUST

    He works as a postdoctoral research scientist in the Digital Video and Multimedia (DVMM) Lab at Columbia University with Shih-Fu Chang. In 2023, he joins HKUST's Department of Computer Science and Engineering as an assistant professor and leads the LONG Group, a computer vision and machine learning research group.

  6. 2025

    AAAI, IJCAI, and NSFC honours

    In 2025, he is a recipient of AAAI New Faculty Highlights, receives an IJCAI Early Career Spotlight, and wins the NSFC Young Scientists Fund (Category-B).

  7. As of October 2026

    Assistant professor at HKUST

    He is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST, with research focused on multimodal understanding, reasoning, and generation. He serves as an associate editor of IEEE TPAMI and IEEE TIP since 2025, and he becomes an IEEE Senior Member in 2026.

Career

  1. Since 2023Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyAssistant Professor
  2. Until 2023Columbia UniversityPostdoctoral Research Scientist
  3. From 2023Department of Computer Science and EngineeringGroup Lead
  4. 2015–2020Nanyang Technological UniversityVisiting Student
  5. 2015–2020National University of SingaporeVisiting Student

Education

  1. 2020Zhejiang UniversityPhD
  2. 2015Dalian University of TechnologyB.Eng.

From the biography.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Long Chen yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Bio | Long Chen @ HKUST zjuchenlong.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Long CHEN 陳隆 | HKUST School of Engineering seng.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. SCA-CNN: Spatial and Channel-wise Attention in Convolutional Networks for Image Captioning arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Publications | Long Chen @ HKUST zjuchenlong.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Counterfactual Critic Multi-Agent Training for Scene Graph Generation arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing for Robust Visual Question Answering arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Long Chen @ HKUST zjuchenlong.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Long CHEN | HKUST CSE cse.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 21 October 2026.