Weitong Zhang

I’m a tenure track assistant professor at the School of Data Science and Society in University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I received my Ph.D. from Department of Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles. I have been fortunate to be advised by Prof. Quanquan Gu. I received my B.E. form Department of Automation, Tsinghua University and M.Sc. during my Ph.D. career. You can find my latest CV here.

If you are interested in talking with me, feel free to booking me an appointment referring to my calendar

Research Interests

Prospective Interns/Students: I’m actively seeking for highly motivated student to work with me:

Prospective interns, Current UNC undergrad / grad students / Postdocs: Please fill out this form (feel free to skip some optional questions) and/or email me at weitongz [at] unc [dot] edu.

Prospective PhD / MS students: The UNC Data Science PhD Program will be open in 2026. You are more than encouraged to apply for UNC CS program for year 2025. You are also welcomed to fill the form above and send emails to me.

My research is centered around machine learning with particular interests in the area of reinforcement learning and AI for science. My ultimate goal is developing reliable AI agent for scientific tasks. I’m actively working on

Theoretical understanding of bandit / RL algorithms: unsupervised exploration in reinforcement learning ((ICML24) and robust reinforcement learning.
RL + Foundation models: Diffusion models for decision making systems, LLM agents
AI for broad scientific tasks: De-novo drug design (w/ Nvidia), ML / RL for self-driving chemical labs (w/ Prof. Chong Liu). I’m actively seeking for more interdisciplinary collaborations!

Weitong Zhang

Research Interests

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