I am currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Data and Information Science (SDIS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I received my Ph.D. from the 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. from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University. You can find my latest CV here.

Feel free to book an appointment on my calendar if you would like to talk with me! I’m looking forward for collaborations! Please drop me an email if you are interested in my research!

Student Hiring 2027: I’m actively seeking for highly motivated student to work with me: I plan to hire 1-2 PhD students starting from 2027. For 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.

Research Interests

My research focuses on reinforcement learning, with applications to modern machine learning models (incl. LLMs, diffusion models) and a deeper understanding of the foundations of exploration . My research goal is to develop and understand reinforcement learning and other machine learning models, with theoretical insights—if not yet fully justified. I am also interested in designing AI agents and learnable models for scientific domains, including (electro)chemistry, physics, molecule science, and more. See my Research for a detailed description.

Recent News

Latest Update @ 2026-07

• [2026-03] We have been awarded an NVIDIA Academic Grant on Federated / Personalized LLM with self-play
• [2025-11] I received the UNC Junior Faculty Development Award.
• [2025-11] I have been invited to give a presentation at the New Faculty Highlights program at AAAI 2026.
• [2025-05] One spotlight paper has been accepted to ICML 2025
• [2025-03] We have been awarded an NVIDIA Academic Grant.
• [2024-05] I’ve successfully defended my dissertation (slides). I appreciate the constant support of all my committee members.
• [2024-04] I joined UNC as an Assistant Professor in the School of Data and Science and Society (Now School of Data and Information Science)

Travel

I love traveling a lot, here is my first visitation to each state (not including the ‘connection airports’ like Houston IAH)