Me
Junkai Zhang (张峻恺)
CS PHD Student @ UCLA

About

I'm now a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at UCLA. I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Wei Wang. I am broadly interested in machine learning. I received my B.S. degree in Mathematics from Tsinghua University in 2022, with a minor in Philosophy

Education


Ph.D.           Sep. 2022 - Present
                     University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, U.S.
                     Ph.D. student in Computer Science
B.S.              Aug. 2018 - Jun. 2022
                     Tsinghua University (THU), Beijing, China.
                     B.S. in Mathematics, Minor in Philosophy

Publications & Manuscripts

DuoGuard: A Two-Player RL-Driven Framework for Multilingual LLM Guardrails
[Paper] [Model]

MetaScientist: A Human-AI Synergistic Framework for Automated Mechanical Metamaterial Design
[Paper] [Demo]
NAACL 2025 - Demo Track

Fast Sampling via Discrete Non-Markov Diffusion Models with Predetermined Transition Time
[Paper]
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)

Uncertainty-Aware Reward-Free Exploration with General Function Approximation
[Paper] [Code]
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024)

Continuous Treatment Effect Modeling in Multi-agent Dynamical Systems
[Paper]
The Web Conference (WWW 2024)

Why Does Sharpness-Aware Minimization Generalize Better Than SGD?
[Paper]
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023)

Optimal Horizon-Free Reward-Free Exploration for Linear Mixture MDPs
[Paper]
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023)

Selected Honors & Awards

  • ICML 2024 Travel Award, 2024
  • NeurlPS 2023 Scholar Award, 2023

Teaching

  • CS 31/32: Introduction to Computer Science - Fall 2023 - Winter 2024
         Teaching Assistant (TA)
  • Academic Services

    Conference Reviewer: ICLR, ICML, AAAI, AISTATS, NAACL
    Volunteer: NeurIPS 2024
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