Runtian Zhai
翟润天
PhD Student
Fourth-year PhD
Machine Learning
Computer Science Department (CSD)
School of Computer Science (SCS)
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Email: rzhai at cmu dot edu
Office: GHC 5105

Fourth-year PhD
Machine Learning
Computer Science Department (CSD)
School of Computer Science (SCS)
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Email: rzhai at cmu dot edu
Office: GHC 5105
Bio [CV]
I am a fourth-year PhD student at CMU CSD, co-advised by Zico Kolter and Pradeep Ravikumar.
I am broadly interested in statistical learning theory, and developing more white-box learning algorithms and architectures that come with provable guarantees.
Currently I am focusing on delineating the mathematical structure of representation learning, including how it generalizes with big models and finite samples, and what low-dimensional representations of human knowledge it obtains.
I am also working on OOD generalization, that is how a model can generalize to a test data distribution different from the training distribution.
I received my Bachelor's degree in computer science and applied math (double degree) from Peking University, where I was advised by Liwei Wang. I visited UCLA in the summer of 2019 and worked with Cho-Jui Hsieh. In the summer of 2022, I worked at Amazon Alexa AI at Sunnyvale as an applied scientist intern. From Sept 2019 to Jun 2020 I worked as a full-time research intern in Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) machine learning group at Beijing.
Service
Peer review:
- ICLR 2023, 2024
- AISTATS 2023, 2024
- AAAI 2024
- SDM 2024
- NeurIPS 2022, 2023
- ICML 2022, 2023
- ICCV 2023
- KDD 2023
- JMLR
- NeurIPS workshops: ML Safety'22, TSRML'22
- ICML workshop: PODS'22
- CMU 10-701: Introduction to Machine Learning Fall 2022 (Head TA)