UCLA Computer Science PhD candidate Seth Z. Zhao and teammate Zewei Zhou have been awarded the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) North America 2026, one of the most competitive and prestigious fellowships in computer science and electrical engineering. The fellowship recognizes outstanding PhD student teams conducting cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and connected intelligent systems.
The UCLA-led team was selected for their proposal, “Think Deep – Move Fast: Building a Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalizable Autonomous Driving with Deep Reasoning and Efficient Action Generation.” Their project introduces NexusVLA-∞, a new Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework designed to help autonomous vehicles reason more like humans while maintaining the speed required for real-time, safety-critical driving decisions.
Zhao and Zhou are advised by Bolei Zhou and Jiaqi Ma, representing a cross-disciplinary collaboration between UCLA Computer Science and the UCLA Civil and Environmental Engineering. Their research spans autonomous driving, multimodal AI reasoning, and high-fidelity simulation systems aimed at improving the deployment of generalizable driving policies in real-world environments.
“It has been a pleasure to mentor Seth throughout this research journey. He consistently brings intellectual curiosity, persistence, and creativity to some of the hardest problems in autonomous driving and embodied AI. I am thrilled to see his work in our lab recognized by the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship,” Bolei Zhou said.
The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship selects only a small cohort of two-student teams each year from 25 participating universities across North America. Besides UCLA, other 2026 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship recipients come from institutions such as Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and UIUC. Beyond financial support, fellows receive not only mentorships from Qualcomm researchers but also opportunities to collaborate on industry-scale challenges in edge AI, autonomous systems, and on-device intelligence.