Zhi Wang

I'm an Associate Professor at Nanjing University in Nanjing, China. I received the Ph.D. degree from City University of Hong Kong and the bachelor's degree from Nanjing University. I was a visiting scholar at University of New South Wales and Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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Research

I'm interested in reinfocement learning algorithms and applications. Specifically, I work on how learning algorithms can scale RL agents to i) dynamic environments, ii) offline settings, and iii) multi-agent systems, allowing them to autonomously adapt to i) non-stationary task distributions, ii) non-interactive scenarios, and iii) cooperative or competitive task assignments, facilitating RL's deployment in real-world domains.

Recently, I work on leveraging foundation models in decision-making problems, exploring ideas of language agents, RL for LLM reasoning, in-context RL, and embodied intelligence.

Language Agents, RL for LLM Reasoning

we propose an innovative framework GLIDER (Grounding Language Models as EffIcient Decision-Making Agents via Offline HiErarchical RL) that introduces a parameter-efficient and generally applicable hierarchy to train competent LLM policies for complex interactive tasks.

we propose Text-to-Decision Agent (T2DA), a simple and scalable pre-training framework for learning generalist policies via aligning language knowledge with environment dynamics of decision tasks.

We introduce LUFFY (Learning to reason Under oFF-policY guidance), a framework that augments zero-RL with off-policy reasoning traces, balancing imitation and exploration by combining off-policy demonstrations with on-policy rollouts during training.

Generalization in RL

We leverage the sequential modeling ability of the transformer architecture and robust task representation learning via world model disentanglement to achieve efficient generalization in offline meta-RL.

We develop a lifelong RL agent that can incrementally adapt its behaviors to dynamic environments, via maintaining an ever-expanding policy library with online Bayesian inference.

Multi-Agent RL

Our main insight is to learn a compact role representation that can capture complex behavior patterns of agents, and use that role representation to promote behavior heterogeneity, knowledge transfer, and skillful coordination across agents.

We propose a novel architecture based on differentiable soft decision trees to tackle the tension between model interpretability and learning performance in MARL domains, paving the way for interpretable and high-performing MARL systems.

RL Applications and Others

For the first time, we introduce an RL-based method to tackle the optimal sensor placement problem for modeling distributed parameter systems.

we propose an Instance Weighting based Fine-tuning (IW-Fit) method, which revises the fine-tuning stage to improve the classification accuracy on the target domain when a pre-trained model from the source domain is given.

Miscellanea