Kunpeng 'KZ' Zhang

Kunpeng 'KZ' Zhang

I am an (applied) machine learning researcher. My current research interests lie in the development of artificial intelligence and representation learning in the context of business, specifically LLM in finance, healthcare, and social media. I am currently an Associate Professor of Information Systems, Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park and a (part time) research scientist at Meta.

kpzhang@umd.edu

VMH4316, 7699 Mowatt Ln
College park, MD 20740
301-405-0702 (O)

  Google Scholar

Research Group


Lang Song, PhD in Applied Math (2020 - )
Bingze Xu, PhD in IS (2020 - )
Efe Sertkaya, PhD in OR/MS (2021 - )
Frankie Shi, PhD in IS (2022 - )
Allen Li, PhD in IS (2025 - )
Yuchen Hao, visiting PhD (2025 - )
Wei Feng (2020 - 2025)
Feiyu E (Postdoc) (2023 - 2025)
Xuewen Han (2022 - 2025)
Mingwei Sun (2018 - 2024)
Dongcheng Zhang (2019 - 2024)

Recent Work (2025-2026)


Journal


Disentangling Inter- and Intra-Cascades Dynamics for Information Diffusion Prediction


Zhangtao Cheng, Yang Liu, Ting Zhong, Kunpeng Zhang, Fan Zhou, and Philip S. Yu

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2025


Help Me Screen: Analyzing and Predicting the Success of Start-ups in Dynamic Venture Capital Networks


Shiwei Lyu, Xiaofeng Li, Suting Hong, Qing Ke, Jinjie Gu, Kunpeng Zhang, and Haipeng Zhang

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2025

[code]


Relational Stock Selection via Probabilistic State Space Learning


Qiang Gao, Zhengxiang Liu, Li Huang, Kunpeng Zhang, Jun Wang, and Guisong Liu

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2025

[code]


COMET: An Interactive Framework for Efficient and Effective Community Search via Active Learning


Jiawei Zhou, Kai Wang, Jianwei Wang, Kunpeng Zhang, and Xuemin Lin

INFORMS Journal on Computing, 2025

[code]


Divide and Contrast: A Text-Based Method for Firm Market Risk Prediction


Yi He, Yi Yang , Defu Lian, and Kunpeng Zhang

INFORMS Journal on Computing, 2025

[code]


Identifying Influential Users by Topic in Unstructured User-generated Content


Mirai Igarashi, Kunpeng Zhang, PK Kannan, and Nobuhiko Terui

Production and Operations Management, 2025

[Appendix]


Conference


Generative Thinking, Corrective Action: User-Friendly Composed Image Retrieval via Automatic Multi-Agent Collaboration


Zhangtao Chen, Yuhao Ma, Yuhao Ma, Jian Lang, Kunpeng Zhang, Ting Zhong, Yong Wang, and Fan Zhou

SIGKDD, 2025


Progressive Dependency Representation Learning for Stock Ranking in Uncertain Risk Contrasting


Yanzhen Xie, Qiang Gao, Kunpeng Zhang, Guisong Liu, Xueqin Chen

SIGKDD, 2025


Human-AI Collaborative Essay Scoring: A Dual-Process Framework with LLMs


Changrong Xiao, Wenxing Ma, Qingping Song, Sean Xin Xu, Kunpeng Zhang, Yufang Wang, and Qi Fu

LAK, 2025

[code]


Commonality Augmented Disentanglement for Multimodal Crowdfunding Success Prediction


Xvoee Xu, Fan Zhou, Goce Trajcevski, Kunpeng Zhang, and Jingkuan Song

ICASSP, 2025