Our Team
Meet the brilliant minds driving innovation in artificial intelligence research
Faculty

Prof. Tong Zhang
Principal Investigator
Tong Zhang is a professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
ProfileStudents

Hanning Zhang
Master Student
I am a Master's student at UIUC working in Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models.
ProfileHanyang Chen
Master Student
I am a second-year MSCS student in UIUC, where i explore Post-training for Multimodal Large Model(MLM), with a particular focus on Embodied AI.
Profile
Jack (Hao) Bai
PhD Student
I am a third-year Ph.D. student in computer science at UIUC, focusing on scaling the reasoning and planning capability of intelligent agents with foundation models and reinforcement learning.
Profile
Jerry Huang
Master Student
I am a Master's student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) advised by Prof. Tong Zhang and Prof. Julia Hockenmaier.
Profile
Nishant Jain
PhD Student
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at UIUC working with Prof. Tong Zhang, with research interests in machine learning, computer vision, and quantum algorithms.
Profile
Pengcheng Wang
Master Student
I am a Master's student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) advised by Prof. Tong Zhang.
Profile
Rui Pan
PhD Student
I am a second-year Ph.D student in computer science, major in optimization and large language model training.
ProfileRui Yang
PhD Student
I am a CS PhD student at UIUC researching agents, trustworthy LLMs/VLMs, and deep reinforcement learning.
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Ruida Wang
PhD Student
I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UIUC, focusing on formal language applications in natural language generation and making ML systems more compatible with human-level reasoning.
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Shivanshu Shekhar
PhD Student
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at UIUC under Prof. Tong Zhang, focusing on deep learning, natural language processing, and optimization for large language models.
Profile


Alumni
Binnie Yiu
Alumni

Cong Fang
Assistant Professor at Peking University
Assistant Professor at Peking University focusing on machine learning algorithms and theory, optimization and the foundation of deep learning.
ProfileDaniel Hsu
Alumni
Daniel Vainsencher
Alumni
Dong Dai
Alumni
Haishan Ye
Alumni

Hanze Dong
Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research
Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research and founding member of the Singapore research team, focusing on LLM training/inference algorithms and reinforcement learning.
ProfileJingwei Zhang
Alumni

Jipeng Zhang
PhD Student at HKUST
Ph.D. student at HKUST focusing on Large Language Models, computational efficiency, specialized models, and multimodal integration.
ProfileKean Ming Tan
Alumni
Lei Han
Alumni
Luo Luo
Assistant Professor at Fudan University
Assistant Professor at Fudan University focusing on machine learning, optimization and linear algebra.
ProfileMatus Telgarsky
Alumni
Paat Helbert
Alumni
Peilin Zhao
Alumni
Qiang Sun
Alumni
Qing Lian
Alumni

Renjie Pi
PhD Student at HKUST
Third-year PhD student at HKUST focusing on data-centric AI, multimodal large language models, and optimization algorithms.
Profile
Shuang Qiu
Alumni
Ting Yang
Alumni
Weizhong Zhang
Alumni
Xiao Zhou
Alumni

Xiaoyu Wang
Postdoctoral Fellow at HKUST
Postdoctoral fellow at HKUST working with Prof. Tong Zhang, focusing on optimization algorithms and their application in large-scale machine learning.
Profile

Xunpeng Huang
PhD Student at HKUST
Third-year Ph.D. student at HKUST focusing on machine learning algorithms and theory including sampling algorithms, stochastic/nonconvex optimization and mean-field analysis.
ProfileYaowei Huang
Alumni

Yong Lin
Postdoc at Princeton University
I am a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton Language and Intelligence(PLI), working with Chi Jin, Sanjeev Arora, and Danqi Chen. I did my PhD study in Tong Zhang's group.
ProfileYuhui Ding
Alumni
Zhichao Huang
Alumni