I am a third-year CS Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Laurent Itti. Previously, I have the privilege of working with Prof. Ram Nevatia.

My research interests lie in Vison-and-Language Navigation and Multi-Modal Perception.

Selected Publications

Three-Step Nav: A Hierarchical Global-Local Planner for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation
Wanrong Zheng, Yunhao Ge, Laurent Itti
AISTATS 2026 [Paper] [Code]

GaitSTR: Gait Recognition with Sequential Two-stream Refinement
Wanrong Zheng*, Haidong Zhu*, Zhaoheng Zheng, Ram Nevatia
TBIOM 2024 [Paper] [Code]

GaitRef: Gait Recognition with Refined Sequential Skeletons
Haidong Zhu*, Wanrong Zheng*, Zhaoheng Zheng, Ram Nevatia
IJCB 2023 Oral [Paper] [Code]

Awards

1st on MS1M dataset in ICCV 2021 Masked Face Recognition Challenge out of 136 teams.
2nd on Glint360k dataset in ICCV 2021 Masked Face Recognition Challenge out of 86 teams.

Research Experience

iLab, USC, Los Angeles, CA
Research Assistant. May. 2024 – Present
Advisor: Prof. Laurent Itti

IRIS Computer Vision Lab, USC, Los Angeles, CA
Research Assistant. Jan. 2022 – May. 2024
Advisor: Prof. Ram Nevatia

SenseTime, China
Research Engineer. Sep. 2019 – Aug. 2021
Advisor: Dr. Xiaoke Jiang and Dr. Ding Liang

Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Research Assistant. Jul. 2018 – Jun. 2019
Advisor: Dr. Qiong Wang

Academic Service

Conference Reviewer: CVPR 2026, ECCV 2026, NeurIPS 2026, AISTATS 2026

Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, International Journal of Computer Vision

Miscellaneous

I am a huge anime and movie fan — over 1,000 films and counting. During breaks, I also love traveling and exploring new places.

My Footprint

My travel footprint across the U.S. — 10 states down, 40 to go :)