About Me

I am an assistant professor at the Data Science and Analytics (DSA) Thrust at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou).

I was privileged to be supervised by Prof. Vincent Y. F. Tan and Prof. Wang Chi Cheung during my PhD study at the National University of Singapore (NUS). After that, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta and was supervised by Prof. Csaba Szepesvári. I heartfully admire their support and encouragement.
Feel free to reach me at “zixinzhong [at] hkust-gz.edu.cn” and download my CV (updated by 09 Sep 2023) here.

I am looking for PhD students/research assistants starting in Fall 2024 or later. We may work on reinforcement learning, online machine learning, multi-armed bandits or exciting topics that attract you. If you are interested, please email me your CV and transcripts. Here is a post in Chinese and some INFO for you to picture your potential PhD life.

Research Interests

Reinforcement learning, online machine learning (e.g., multi-armed bandit problem)

News

• 11/07/2024: Delighted to join the Data Science and Analytics (DSA) Thrust at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor!
• 11/07/2024: Paper "Optimal clustering with bandit feedback" accepted by Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). In this paper, we study the problem of clustering arms with bandit feedback. This is joint work with Junwen Yang and Vincent Y. F. Tan.
  I sincerely thank my collaborators' great efforts!
• 07/05/2024: Our work accepted by TMLR is presented as a poster in ICLR 2024.
• 09/09/2023: Paper "Achieving the Pareto Frontier of Regret Minimization and Best Arm Identification in Stochastic Bandits" accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). In this paper, we study the Pareto frontier of two archetypal objectives in multi-armed bandits, namely, regret minimization (RM) and best arm identification (BAI) with a fixed horizon. This is joint work with Wang Chi Cheung and Vincent Y. F. Tan.
  We are delighted that this is a TMLR paper chosen to be one with "featured certification".
• 12/06/2023: Won the Louis Chen Hsiao Yun Best Dissertation Prize from NUS. 🏆
  This prize is awarded annually to the student with the best Ph.D. thesis in mathematics and its applications.
  Sincere thanks to the continuous support from my supervisors Prof. Vincent Y. F. Tan and Prof. Wang Chi Cheung! This prize is also for you.