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.

Feel free to booking me an appointment my calendar if you would like to talk with me!

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.

I’m looking forward for collaborations! Please drop me an email if you are interested in my research!

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.

Recent News

Latest Update @ 2025-05

• [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 will be joining UNC SDSS as a tenure track assistant professor.
• [2023-06] It is my great fortune to have been awarded the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship.

Travel

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