Research

Research Interests

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE), advised by Prof. Fode Zhang. My research focuses on building more reliable learning systems through causal analysis, with particular interest in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and transfer learning.

Selected Work

Publications

Conference Papers

Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Causal Route Gating

Zhe Cheng, Wenyu Chen, Fode Zhang, and Dehuan Shen. ICML 2026, Spotlight.

Domain Adaptation with Adaptive f-Divergence: Tighter Variational Representation and Generalization Bounds

Zhe Cheng, Fode Zhang, Yifan Zhu, Lingrui Wang, and Jiaolong Wang. ICML 2026, Accepted.

Journal Articles

Causality-Preserving Domain Generalization via Adaptive Fourier Mixup for RUL Prediction

Yifan Zhu, Wenyu Chen, Zhe Cheng, and Fode Zhang. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2026.

Mitigating Distal Interference in Continual Learning through Locally Gated Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks

Zhe Cheng and Bin Liu. Neurocomputing, 699, 134392, 2026.

Order-Preserving Kernel Contrastive Learning With Applications to Cross-Domain RUL Prediction

Yifan Zhu, Fode Zhang, Wenyu Chen, Zhe Cheng, and Lijuan Shen. IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 2026.

Randomized algorithms for tensor response regression

Zhe Cheng, X. Xu, Z. Song, et al. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining: The ASA Data Science Journal, 2023.

Low tubal rank tensor completion based on singular value factors

Z. Song, X. Xu, Zhe Cheng, et al. International Journal of Computer Mathematics, 2023.

Bayesian Variable Selection Based on the Tobit Quantile Regression Model

Weihua Zhao, Ling Wang, Zhe Cheng, et al. Chinese Management Science, 2022.

Under Review

When Does Rank Limit LoRA? A Local Dense-vs-Low-Rank Gap Diagnostic

Zhe Cheng, Zihao Song, and Fode Zhang. 2026.

Reliability-Aware Information Bottleneck Adaptation for Cross-Domain Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Zhe Cheng, Fode Zhang, Yifan Zhu, and Hon Keung Tony Ng. 2025.

Distributionally Robust Domain Adversarial Generalization Approach Based on (f, Gamma)-Divergence

Jiaolong Wang, Fode Zhang, Linrui Wang, and Zhe Cheng. 2025.

Funding

Research Grants

2025

Principal Investigator

Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JBK2507005).

Causal Representation Learning for Cross-Domain RUL Prediction.

Recognition

Awards

2024

National Second Prize

Huawei Cup Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling Competition.

2023

National Third Prize

Huawei Cup Graduate Student Mathematical Modeling Competition.