The LEAD Research Lab

Research Vision of our LEAD Research Lab

We live in an era defined by intelligence and connectivity. Artificial intelligence is the new “water” and “electricity”. AI computing and communication systems, such as data centers, communication networks, and IoT systems, are like pipes and wires, enabling intelligence flow smoothly across different platforms, devices, and users.

Just as well-designed power grids ensure electricity reaches every corner of the world with efficiency and reliability, I strive to develop scalable and robust machine learning algorithms to make optimal decisions in AI computing and communication systems. By doing so, I hope AI can be produced and delivered in a way that is accessible, adaptable, and reliable across diverse environments and use cases.

Student Recruitment

I will be joining the University of Washington (Tacoma campus, ~30 miles from the Seattle campus) as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Fall 2025. 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 research group (Learning, Evaluation, and Advanced Decision-making), focusing on theory and/or application frontiers of multi-agent reinforcement learning, combinatorial 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. I can recommend outstanding students for exchange visits to top schools or internships/jobs at top company research institutes.

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 (highlights of student first-authored works)

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: EMNLP ‘25 in submission
  
• Jingyuan Liu (visiting undergraduate student from NJU), 2024-Present: NeurIPS ‘25 in submission
  

UMass Amherst (with Prof. Mohammad Hajiesmaili), CICS

• Fatemeh Ghaffari (Ph.D. student in CICS at UMass Amherst), 2024-Present: NeurIPS ‘25 in submission
  
• Anupama Sitaraman (undergraduate student at UMass $\rightarrow$ Ph.D. student in CS at CMU), 2023-2024: JCSS ‘25 $\times 1$
  

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

• Ziyi Han (Ph.D. student in CSE at CUHK), 2024-Present: NeurIPS ‘25 in submission
  
• Zeyu Zhang (Ph.D. student in CSE at CUHK), 2024-Present
  
• Xiangxiang Dai (Ph.D. student in CSE at CUHK), 2023-Present: NeurIPS ‘25 in submission, KDD ‘25 $\times 1$, 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

• Zhaoying He (master student in EE at FDU), 2024-Present
• 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: NeurIPS ‘25 in submission, AAAI ‘24 $\times 1$