Zhimin Li

I am a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, advised by Jingtong Hu. My research focuses on efficient and trustworthy AI, especially privacy-preserving vision-language models for wearable devices, fairness in medical imaging, and efficient AI deployment on edge systems.

My recent work studies how to protect visual information in wearable AI while keeping vision-language inference efficient on real smart glasses. I also co-developed a preference-aligned diffusion framework for demographically equitable medical image synthesis, and contributed to efficient real-time object detection on mobile hardware.

Research interests

Efficient and Trustworthy AI · Edge and Embedded AI · Vision-Language Models · DNN Acceleration · AI Fairness and Privacy

Selected publications

Figure 1 from SAGE, comparing previous protected inference with the efficient protected pipeline on smart glasses.

SAGE: Efficient Protected Vision-Language Inference on Smart Glasses

Zhimin Li, Pan Wang, Jingxian Chen, Yuantao Tang, Qian Lou, Jingtong Hu

arXiv, 2026 · Under review at ICLR 2027

Paper PDF Figure 1

Figure 1 from FairGen, showing data imbalance, diffusion training, and downstream classifier training.

FairGen: Preference-Aligned Diffusion for Demographically Equitable Medical Image Synthesis

Zhimin Li*, Ruichen Zhang*, Zhen Tan*, Howard J. Aizenstein, Jingtong Hu, Tianlong Chen

npj Digital Medicine, 2026.

Paper PDF Figure 1 Code

Figure 2 from the wearable VLM privacy paper, showing the benchmark, trusted device pipeline, source model, and external attacker path.

Defending Wearable VLMs Against Private Attribute Inference

Zhimin Li, Pan Wang, Jingxian Chen, Yuantao Tang, Anthony Chen, Qian Lou, Jingtong Hu

arXiv, 2026 · Under review at ICLR 2027

Paper PDF Figure 2

Figure 3 from AyE-Edge, showing its development tool for edge object detection.

AyE-Edge: Automated Deployment Space Search Empowering Accuracy yet Efficient Real-Time Object Detection on the Edge

Chao Wu, Yifan Gong, Liangkai Liu, Mengquan Li, Yushu Wu, Xuan Shen, Zhimin Li, Geng Yuan, Weisong Shi, Yanzhi Wang

ICCAD, 2024.

Paper PDF Figure 3

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Google Scholar · GitHub · ORCID · LinkedIn · Email