Bio

Welcome to my homepage! I am Tianxiang Zhao, an Assistant Professor in the AI thrust at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), starting in February 2026. Prior to joining HKUST(GZ), I worked as an LLM Researcher at Huawei through the TopMinds (天才少年) program in 2025. I graduated from the Class of Gifted Young at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2017, and in 2019, I left my Master’s program at USTC to begin my Ph.D. journey. I received my Ph.D. in 2024 from the Pennsylvania State University, where I was co-advised by Prof. Xiang Zhang and Prof. Suhang Wang.

Research

My research focuses on data-centric machine learning. Recently, my interests include the following directions:

RL in PostTraining:
- Stable and efficient on-policy distillation.
- Agentic RL
Efficiency of Vision-Language models in reasoning
Agentic systems
Trustworthy in Machine Learning:
- Learning from imperfect supervison (e.g., noisy or unlabeled data);
- Model debias
- Explanablity approaches for understanding model behaviors and learning dynamics

I am broadly interested in topics related to machine learning and cross-disciplinary applications. Feel free to email me if you’d like to connect.

Education

2019 - 2024, Ph.D, Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University
2017 - 2019, Master student, University of Science and Technology of China
2013 - 2017, Bachelor in Computer Science, Class of The Gifted Young, University of Science and Technology of China

Tianxiang Zhao

Research

Education

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