Ziquan Wei

372B Medical School Wing D

336 Emergency Room Dr

Chapel Hill, NC 27514

About me

👋 I’m Ziquan Wei (魏梓泉 in Chinese). A researcher and PhD candidate supervised by Dr. Guorong Wu at UNC-Chapel Hill. I’m meanwhile the linux system administrator at ACMLab. Previously, I obtained a Master’s degree supervised by Prof. Shaoqun Zeng and a Bachelor’s degree supervised by Prof. Yang Yang.

Research interests

Brain foundation model

Graph representation learning

Medical imaging analysis

Education & Experience

2023 - Present	PhD in Computer Science at UNC CS, Chapel Hill
2022 - 2023	Pre-doc Fellow Trainee at UNC ACMLab, Chapel Hill
2019 - 2022	Master in Biomedical Engineering at HUST, Wuhan
2015 - 2019	Bachelor in Computer Science at YNNU, Kunming

Find CV.pdf here.

Rewards

UNC grad school transportation grant
HUST outstanding graudation

Services

Reviewer (conferences): CAAI, MICCAI, NeurIPS, AISTATS, ICLR, ICML.
Reviewer (journals): Pattern Recognition, IEEE TMI, J. o. Supercomputing, Computers in Biology and Medicine, IEEE Systems Journal Associate, Signal, Image and Video Processing.
Editorial board: Scientific Reports (Editor of Distinction Award 2025).

News

Sep 21, 2025	⭐ One paper has been accepted by NeurIPS: BrainMoE.
May 12, 2025	⭐ One paper has been early accepted by MICCAI (9%): Brain-Environment Cross-Attention (BECA)
Jan 22, 2025	⭐ Our paper has been accepted by ICLR (Spotlight) [OpenReview]
Oct 10, 2024	⭐ Our paper has been accepted by PNAS [arXiv]
Sep 25, 2024	⭐ Two of our papers have been accepted by NeurIPS! [Poster PDF] [Workshop PDF]

Selected publications

NeurIPS

BrainMoE: Cognition Joint Embedding via Mixture-of-Expert Towards Robust Brain Foundation Model

Ziquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Tianlong Chen, and Guorong Wu

In The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025

DOI Bib HTML PDF

@inproceedings{wei2025brainmoe,
  dimensions = {true},
  title = {BrainMoE: Cognition Joint Embedding via Mixture-of-Expert Towards Robust Brain Foundation Model},
  author = {Wei, Ziquan and Dan, Tingting and Chen, Tianlong and Wu, Guorong},
  booktitle = {The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {NeurIPS},
  doi = {},
  url = {https://neurips.cc/virtual/2025/poster/120350}
}

MICCAI

Brain-Environment Cross-Attention (BECA) Meta-Matching: A New Perspective of Brain Connectome Zero-Shot Learning

Ziquan Wei, Tingting Dan, and Guorong Wu

In proceedings of Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2025, Sep 2025

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{wei2025beca,
  dimensions = {true},
  author = {Wei, Ziquan and Dan, Tingting and Wu, Guorong},
  title = { { Brain-Environment Cross-Attention (BECA) Meta-Matching: A New Perspective of Brain Connectome Zero-Shot Learning } },
  booktitle = {proceedings of Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2025},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
  volume = {LNCS 15971},
  month = sep,
  page = {140 -- 149},
  url = {https://papers.miccai.org/miccai-2025/0112-Paper2086.html}
}

NeurIPS

NeuroPath: A Neural Pathway Transformer for Joining the Dots of Human Connectomes

Ziquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Jiaqi Ding, and Guorong Wu

In The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Sep 2024

DOI Bib HTML

@inproceedings{wei2024neuropath,
  dimensions = {true},
  title = {NeuroPath: A Neural Pathway Transformer for Joining the Dots of Human Connectomes},
  author = {Wei, Ziquan and Dan, Tingting and Ding, Jiaqi and Wu, Guorong},
  booktitle = {The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {NeurIPS},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2409.17510},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=AvBuK8Ezrg}
}

NeurIPSW

Non-local Exchange: Introduce Non-locality via Graph Re-wiring to Graph Neural Networks

Ziquan Wei, and Guorong Wu

In NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Behavioral Machine Learning, Sep 2024

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{wei2024nonlocal,
  dimensions = {true},
  title = {Non-local Exchange: Introduce Non-locality via Graph Re-wiring to Graph Neural Networks},
  author = {Wei, Ziquan and Wu, Guorong},
  booktitle = {NeurIPS 2024 Workshop on Behavioral Machine Learning},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {NeurIPSW},
  url = {https://openreview.net/forum?id=dw4pR39eUD},
}

MICCAI

Representing Functional Connectivity with Structural Detour: A New Perspective to Decipher Structure-Function Coupling Mechanism

Ziquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Jiaqi Ding, Paul Laurienti, and 1 more author

In proceedings of Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention – MICCAI 2024, Oct 2024

DOI Bib HTML

@inproceedings{wei2024representing,
  dimensions = {true},
  author = {Wei, Ziquan and Dan, Tingting and Ding, Jiaqi and Laurienti, Paul and Wu, Guorong},
  title = { Representing Functional Connectivity with Structural Detour: A New Perspective to Decipher Structure-Function Coupling Mechanism },
  booktitle = {proceedings of Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2024},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {MICCAI},
  volume = {LNCS 15002},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-72069-7_35},
  url_link = {https://papers.miccai.org/miccai-2024/649-Paper1549.html},
  page = {pending}
}

MICCAI

A General Stitching Solution for Whole-Brain 3D Nuclei Instance Segmentation from Microscopy Images

Ziquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Jiaqi Ding, Mustafa Dere, and 1 more author

In International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (Early accept – 14%), Oct 2023

DOI Bib HTML PDF

@inproceedings{wei2023general,
  dimensions = {true},
  title = {A General Stitching Solution for Whole-Brain 3D Nuclei Instance Segmentation from Microscopy Images},
  author = {Wei, Ziquan and Dan, Tingting and Ding, Jiaqi and Dere, Mustafa and Wu, Guorong},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention <span style="color:red; font-weight: bold;">(Early accept -- 14\%)</span>},
  pages = {46--55},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {MICCAI},
  doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-43901-8_5},
  url_link = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374344012_A_General_Stitching_Solution_for_Whole-Brain_3D_Nuclei_Instance_Segmentation_from_Microscopy_Images},
  organization = {Springer Nature Switzerland Cham}
}

ICCVW

Continuous emotion recognition with audio-visual leader-follower attentive fusion

Su Zhang^*, Yi Ding^*, Ziquan Wei^*, and Cuntai Guan

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops, Oct 2021

DOI Bib HTML

@inproceedings{zhang2021continuous,
  dimensions = {true},
  title = {Continuous emotion recognition with audio-visual leader-follower attentive fusion},
  author = {Zhang, Su and Ding, Yi and Wei, Ziquan and Guan, Cuntai},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops},
  pages = {3567--3574},
  publisher = {ICCVW},
  doi = {10.1109/iccvw54120.2021.00397},
  year = {2021}
}

A small UAV based multi-temporal image registration for dynamic agricultural terrace monitoring

Ziquan Wei, Yifeng Han, Mengya Li, Kun Yang, and 3 more authors

Remote Sensing, Oct 2017

DOI Bib HTML

@article{wei2017small,
  dimensions = {true},
  title = {A small UAV based multi-temporal image registration for dynamic agricultural terrace monitoring},
  author = {Wei, Ziquan and Han, Yifeng and Li, Mengya and Yang, Kun and Yang, Yang and Luo, Yi and Ong, Sim-Heng},
  journal = {Remote Sensing},
  volume = {9},
  number = {9},
  pages = {904},
  year = {2017},
  publisher = {MDPI},
  doi = {10.3390/rs9090904},
}