ScaleML Lab · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Research in Artificial Intelligence

We study the foundations and systems of machine learning, spanning optimization, theory, and large-scale models, with a focus on reliable real-world impact.

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Lab Research

Research Directions

We investigate the fundamental theory of machine learning, design efficient and effective algorithms, and develop systems that reliably work in real-world settings.

Theoretical Foundation of Machine Learning

Mathematical theory of learning algorithms, deep/overparameterized models, bandits, and sample-efficient RL.

Efficient Computational Algorithms

Efficient optimization and sampling, large-scale and distributed training, and automatic tuning of ML models.

Adaptive Algorithms and Reinforcement Learning

Adaptation under distribution shift, multi-objective learning, misspecification, and learning in dynamic environments.

Generative AI and Large Language Models

Multimodal generative models, data quality, efficient computation, alignment, reasoning, and agentic systems.

Research Projects

Explore our cutting-edge research projects pushing the boundaries of AI

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Featured

LMFlow

An Extensible Toolkit for Finetuning and Inference of Large Foundation Models. Large Models for All.

NAACL 2024 Best Demo Award

LLMMLSys

July 15, 2025

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Featured

EmbodiedBench

A comprehensive benchmark for evaluating multi-modal large language models as vision-driven embodied agents across diverse environments and task complexities.

ICML 2025 OralComprehensive Benchmark

Multi-modal AIEmbodied AgentsVision-Language ModelsRoboticsBenchmark

January 1, 2025

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Latest News

Stay updated with our recent achievements and announcements

October 15, 2025

Our Paper Accepted at NeurIPS 2025

Breakthrough research on LLM published at the leading AI conference

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Our Team

Meet the brilliant minds driving innovation in artificial intelligence research

Faculty

Prof. Tong Zhang

Principal Investigator

Students

Chenlu Ye

PhD Student

Direction: LLM reinforcement learning, reasoning and multi-turn agent

Hanning Zhang

Master Student

Direction: LLM Reasoning, LLM Alignment, Empirical Reinforcement Learning

Hanyang Chen

Master Student

Direction: Embodied AI; Reinforcement Learning

Jack (Hao) Bai

PhD Student

Direction: Empirical multi-step reinforcement learning on real-world tasks

Jerry Huang

Master Student

Jiarui Yao

PhD Student

Direction: Agents, RL for LLMs, Multimodal LLMs

Nishant Jain

PhD Student

Pengcheng Wang

Master Student

Direction: LLM Agents, Diffusion Language Model

Rui Pan

PhD Student

Direction: Optimization, Acceleration, LLM training

Rui Yang

PhD Student

Direction: Reinforcement Learning, LLM Alignment, VLM-based Agents

Ruida Wang

PhD Student

Shivanshu Shekhar

PhD Student

Wei Xiong

PhD Student

Yifan Hao

PhD Student

Yuxing Liu

PhD Student

Direction: Optimization theory and practice, LLM training

Alumni

Binnie Yiu

Engineer at CLP.

Cong Fang

Assistant Professor at Peking University

Daniel Hsu

Associate Professor at Columbia University.

Daniel Vainsencher

Consultant at Nirinor, LLC.

Dong Dai

Director of Global HEOR at Daiichi Sankyo, Inc.

Haishan Ye

Assistant Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University.

Hanze Dong

Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research

Jingwei Zhang

Algorithm Engineer at SharpSight Limited (HK).

Jipeng Zhang

PhD Student at HKUST

Kean Ming Tan

Assistant Professor at University of Michigan.

Lei Han

Research Scientist at Tencent.

Luo Luo

Assistant Professor at Fudan University

Matus Telgarsky

Assistant Professor at NYU.

Paat Helbert

RA at PolyU HK.

Peilin Zhao

Research Scientist at Tencent.

Qiang Sun

Associate Professor at University of Toronto.

Qing Lian

Research Scientist at DJI.

Renjie Pi

PhD Student at HKUST

Shizhe Diao

NVIDIA Research Scientist

Shuang Qiu

Assistant Professor at Hong Kong CityU.

Ting Yang

Data Scientist at Yelp.

Weizhong Zhang

Assistant Professor at Fudan University.

Xiao Zhou

Quantitative Trading.

Xiaoyu Wang

Postdoctoral Fellow at HKUST

Xinwei Shen

Assistant Professor at the University of Washington

Xunpeng Huang

PhD Student at HKUST

Yaowei Huang

Engineer at Ant Financial.

Yong Lin

Postdoc at Princeton University

Yuhui Ding

PhD student at ETH.

Zhichao Huang

Research Scientist at ByteDance.