Zhanda Zhu (朱展达) - Ph.D. Student at University of Toronto

Zhanda Zhu (朱展达)

I am a second year Ph.D. student at University of Toronto, supervised by Prof. Gennady Pekhimenko. I also received my research master degree here. Before coming to UofT, I received my bachelor degree in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with honor in Zhiyuan College in 2022.

My research interests lie in the broad area of systems for machine learning, especially in efficient large-scale model pre-training, post-training, and serving. I have been fortunate to work at NVIDIA, CentML (acquired by NVIDIA), Microsoft Research Asia, and Vector Institute, contributing to projects in large-scale machine learning systems.

Publications

[EuroSys '26]	LoRAFusion: Efficient LoRA Fine-Tuning for LLMs Zhanda Zhu, Qidong Su, Yaoyao Ding, Kevin Song, Shang Wang, Gennady Pekhimenko
[Arxiv '2508]	Aegis: Taxonomy and Optimizations for Overcoming Agent-Environment Failures in LLM Agents Kevin Song, Anand Jayarajan, Yaoyao Ding, Qidong Su, Zhanda Zhu, Sihang Liu, Gennady Pekhimenko Arxiv Version
[MLSys '25]	Seesaw: High-throughput LLM Inference via Model Re-sharding Qidong Su, Wei Zhao, Xin Li, Muralidhar Andoorveedu, Chenhao Jiang, Zhanda Zhu, Kevin Song, Christina Giannoula, Gennady Pekhimenko Arxiv Version / Slides / Artifact Badges: Available Functional Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention
[EuroSys '25]	Mist: Efficient Distributed Training of Large Language Models via Memory-Parallelism Co-Optimization Zhanda Zhu, Christina Giannoula, Muralidhar Andoorveedu, Karttikeya Mangalam, Qidong Su, Bojian Zheng, Gennady Pekhimenko Paper / Arxiv Version / Code / Artifact Badges: Available Functional Reproduced
[Arxiv '2208]	Efficient Adaptive Activation Rounding for Post-Training Quantization Zhengyi Li, Cong Guo, Zhanda Zhu, Yangjie Zhou, Yuxian Qiu, Xiaotian Gao, Jingwen Leng, Minyi Guo Arxiv Version
[NeurIPS '22]	Tempo: Accelerating Transformer-Based Model Training through Memory Footprint Reduction Muralidhar Andoorveedu, Zhanda Zhu, Bojian Zheng, Gennady Pekhimenko Paper / Arxiv Version / Slides / Code
[ICRA '21]	RGB Matters: Learning 7-DoF Grasp Poses on Monocular RGBD Images Minghao Gou, Haoshu Fang, Zhanda Zhu, Shengwei Xu, Chenxi Wang, Cewu Lu Paper / Arxiv Version / Code

Experience

NVIDIA Toronto, Canada	Jun. 2025 - Present
System Software Engineer
CentML (Acquired by NVIDIA) Toronto, Canada	Sep. 2022 - Jun. 2025
Research Software Engineer
Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) Remote due to COVID	Jun. 2022 - Aug. 2022
Research Intern in the System Research Group
Vector Institute Remote due to COVID	Jul. 2021 - Dec. 2021
Research Assistant to Prof. Gennady Pekhimenko
Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China	Apr. 2021 - Jun. 2022
EPCC Lab, Research Assistant to Prof. Jengwen Leng
Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China	Jun. 2020 - Oct. 2020
MVIG Lab, Research Assistant to Prof. Cewu Lu

Awards

University of Toronto Fellowship, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering	2023, 2024, 2025
Edward S. Rogers Sr. Graduate Scholarships	2022, 2023
Vector Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence (CAD $17,500)	2022
Kai Yin Shen Graduate Scholarship (CAD $5,190)	2022
Excellent Graduates in Shanghai	2022
National Scholarship × 3 (CN ¥8000, Top 0.5%, 1 or 2 / 156)	2019 & 2020 & 2021
Shanghai Jiao Tong University Excellent Scholarship × 2 (Class A, CN ¥1500, Top 1/156)	2020 & 2021
Tang Lixin Scholarship (CN ¥10000 every year, Top 0.1%, 50 / 44123)	from 2020
Zhiyuan College Honors Scholarship × 5 (CN ¥5000, Top 5%)	2018 & 2019 & 2020 & 2021