The LEAD Research Group

I plan to recruit self-motivated PhD students (in 2026 fall), graduate researchers, and undergraduate interns (both in-person and remote) to build our LEAD (Learning, Evaluation, and Advanced Decision-making) research group, focusing on theory and/or application frontiers of reinforcement learning, online learning, cost-effective LLM, and AI for networks.

Students will have opportunities to collaborate with leading researchers from UW, CMU, UMass Amherst, Microsoft Research, and Adobe, etc.

Most of our previous/current collaborations would turn into publications in top-tier venues/journals (see examples below).

If you’re interested in joining us, please contact me with your CV.

Student Mentoring Experience

Carnegie Mellon University (with Prof. Carlee Joe-Wong), ECE

• Hanqing Yang (master student at CMU $\rightarrow$ Ph.D. student in ECE at CMU), 2024-Present
  
• Jingyuan Liu (visiting undergraduate student from NJU), 2024-Present: ICML ‘25 in submission
  

UMass Amherst (with Prof. Mohammad Hajiesmaili), CICS

• Fatemeh Ghaffari (Ph.D. student in CICS at UMass Amherst), 2024-Present
  
• Anupama Sitaraman (undergraduate student at UMass $\rightarrow$ Ph.D. student in CS at CMU), 2023-2024: JCSS minor revision
  

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (with Prof. John C.S. Lui), CSE

• Ziyi Han (Ph.D. student in CSE at CUHK), 2024-Present
  
• Zeyu Zhang (Ph.D. student in CSE at CUHK), 2024-Present
  
• Xiangxiang Dai (Ph.D. student in CSE at CUHK), 2023-Present: ICML ‘25 in submission, IEEE/ACM TON $\times 1$, ACM MM ‘24 $\times 1$
  
• Zhiyong Wang (Ph.D. student in CSE at CUHK \& visiting student at Cornell), 2022-2023: NeurIPS ‘23 $\times 1$, AAAI ‘23 $\times 1$
  
• Yu-Zhen Janice CHEN (undergraduate student at CUHK $\rightarrow$ Ph.D. in CICS at UMass Amherst), 2017-2018: Network Science Journal $\times 1$
  

Fudan University (with Prof. Yuedong Xu), EE

• Junkai Wang (master student in EE at FDU), 2023-Present: INFOCOM ‘25 $\times 1$

University of Science and Technology of China (with Prof. Hong Xie and Prof. Defu Lian), CS

• Hantao Yang (master student at USTC $\rightarrow$ Ph.D. in CS at USTC), 2023-Present: ICML ‘25 in submission, AAAI ‘24 $\times 1$