Honoring Excellence: Wu Wenjun Award for Di Huang—Our Former PhD Student—and our Longtime Collaborators

We are pleased to share that Prof. Huang Di, along with Prof. Yunhong Wang and Ass.Prof. Hongyu Yang, has been awarded the First Prize in Natural Science at the 2024 Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Awards—the highest national recognition in intelligent science and technology in China. Their research, "Efficient Representation Learning for Complex Visual Tasks", makes important theoretical and practical contributions by overcoming efficiency bottlenecks in visual representation learning across model design, data usage, and cross-domain transfer. The work has already seen impact across key sectors and has been praised for its simplicity, efficiency, and performance. We are especially proud of this achievement because Prof. Huang Di completed his PhD within the Liris lab at Ecole Centrale de Lyon, and it’s been a joy to see him grow into a leading researcher. We also value the long-standing scientific collaboration we’ve had with the group of Prof. Yunhong Wang and Prof. Di Huang—their continued excellence and dedication to advancing AI is so fruitful in our joint research topics. Congratulations to the entire team! This is a remarkable milestone and a strong step forward for the AI research community.

The Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Award is named after Mr. Wu Wenjun, a world-renowned Chinese scientist in the field of intelligent science and technology, a master mathematician, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, the founding leader of AI research in China, the first recipient of the national top science and technology award, and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Established with the support of civil society, the award is qualified to nominate candidates for the National Science and Technology Awards and is recognized as the "highest honor in intelligent science and technology in China."

The award-winning project from our lab, "Efficient Representation Learning for Complex Visual Tasks", focused on in-depth research in visual representation, overcoming efficiency bottlenecks in model structure, sample utilization, and cross-domain transfer. The project has established a comprehensive theory and methodology for efficient visual representation learning. The results have been highly praised by domestic and international experts as "simple, efficient, and high-performing" and "state-of-the-art in performance." Some of these results have already been successfully applied in key government sectors and leading industrial enterprises, generating significant social and economic benefits.