Tianyue Zhou

Tianyue Zhou

Ph.D. Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering

Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Advisor: Prof. Cathy Wu

I study reinforcement learning, with a focus on multi-task RL, contextual RL, transfer learning, and the interpretability of RL agents. My research explores sample-efficient methods for learning in complex decision-making settings. Previously, I worked on recommendation systems and online preference learning.

Publications

Expert with Clustering framework diagram

Expert with Clustering: Hierarchical Online Preference Learning Framework [paper]

Tianyue Zhou, Jung-Hoon Cho, Babak Rahimi Ardabili, Hamed Tabkhi, Cathy Wu

Learning for Dynamics and Control Conference (L4DC), pp. 707–718, 2024

The Nah Bandit illustration

The Nah Bandit: Modeling User Non-compliance in Recommendation Systems [paper] [website] [code]

Tianyue Zhou, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu

IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, Vol. 12, Issue 4, pp. 2919–2931, Dec. 2025

SD-MBTL structure detection diagram

Structure Detection for Contextual Reinforcement Learning [paper] [website] [code]

Tianyue Zhou, Jung-Hoon Cho, Cathy Wu

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 40, No. 34, pp. 29009–29016, 2026

Research Interests

  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Multi-task RL
  • Contextual RL
  • Transfer Learning
  • RL Interpretability
  • Sample-Efficient Learning
  • Recommendation Systems

Education

Sept 2025 – Present

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Cambridge, MA

Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering · Advisor: Prof. Cathy Wu · GPA: 5.0/5.0

Sept 2021 – June 2025

ShanghaiTech University

Shanghai, China

B.Eng. in Computer Science · GPA: 3.75/4.0

Honors & Awards

  • ShanghaiTech Outstanding Student (2021–2022), Top 3%–7% Dec 2022
  • Scholarship for Undergraduate 3+1 Overseas Exchange Program (~$9,000) June 2024