Runtian Zhai
翟润天
PhD Student
Fifth-year PhD Candidate
Area: Machine Learning
Computer Science Department (CSD)
School of Computer Science (SCS)
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
Email: rzhai at cmu dot edu
Office: GHC 5105
Fifth-year PhD Candidate
Area: 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 final year PhD student at CMU CSD, co-advised by Zico Kolter and Pradeep Ravikumar.
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 study machine learning theory and algorithms. My primary interest are representation learning and generalization theory, including statistical generalization and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization.
I am developing self-supervised methods for learning representations that are more controllable and interpretable than the prevailing black-box AI models, and applying these methods to various modalities.
I also work on general statistical learning theory.
I am enthusiastic about mentoring students, especially students who just started doing research. Several of my past mentees have published their first ML papers at top venues, and been hired by top tech companies such as OpenAI and Amazon. For junior students: Please feel free to contact me by email if you are interested in working with me, especially if you want to work on representation learning, self-supervised learning, or generalization theory.
Services
Peer review:
- JMLR
- Nature Communications
- ICLR 2023 - 2025
- NeurIPS 2022 - 2024
- ICML 2022 - 2024
- AISTATS 2023 - 2024
- KDD 2023 - 2025
- AAAI 2025
- ICCV 2023
- ECCV 2024
- ACCV 2024
- SDM 2024
- ICLR workshop: BGPT'24
- NeurIPS workshops: M3L'23, R0-FoMo'23, ML-Safety'22, TSRML'22
- ICML workshop: PODS'22
- CMU 15-750: Algorithms in the Real World Fall 2024
- CMU 10-701: Introduction to Machine Learning Fall 2022 (Head TA)
News
- Two papers accepted by ICLR 2024 as spotlight.
- Two papers accepted by NeurIPS 2023.
- Two papers at ICLR 2023 workshops.
- One paper accepted by ICLR 2023.
Links