Research Group

  • Ph.D. students supervised and chaired:
             Tianqi Chen (IROM)
             Haoran Zhang (CS, co-supervised with Wesley Tansey at MSKCC)
  • Ph.D. students advised (main advisors to be determined):
             Tianyu Chen (SDS)
             Yi Gu (SDS)
             Liyang Xie (SDS)
             Yueqin Yin (IROM)
  • Former Ph.D. students supervised by me
             Shentao Yang (Ph.D. in Statistics, Defended in March 2025, Thesis title: "Designing, Learning, and Utilizing Dense Reward for Generative AI Alignment," Joining Google in April 2025)
             Xizewen Han (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in November 2024, Thesis title: "Classification and Regression Diffusion Models and Tree-based Extensions," joining a Start-Up in Sports Analytics)
             Zhendong Wang (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in November 2024, Thesis title: "Enhancing Generative Model Efficiency and Control for Data Generation, Reinforcement Learning, and Robotics," Senior Researcher at Microsoft)
             Yilin He (Ph.D. in Statistics, Defended in August 2024, Thesis title: "Advancing Representation Learning and Data Generation on Graphs with Bayesian Deep Learning Methodologies," Machine Learning Engineer at ByteDance)
             Huangjie Zheng (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in August 2024, Thesis title: "Implicit Distributional Matching at High Dimensionality," Research Scientist at Apple Machine Learning Research)
             Shujian Zhang (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in October 2023, Thesis title: "Probabilistic Language Models with Model Efficiency and Data Efficiency," Research Scientist at Google DeepMind)
             Korawat Tanwisuth (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in April 2023, Thesis title: "A Prototype-oriented Framework for Deep Transfer Learning Applications," Software Engineer at Google)
             Alek Dimitriev (Ph.D. in Statistics, Defended in April 2022, Thesis title: "Gradient Estimation for Discrete Variables via Dependent Monte Carlo Samples," Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Google --> Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic)
             Xinjie Fan (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in April 2021, Thesis title: "Deep Neural Networks with Contextual Probabilistic Units," Software Engineer at Nuro --> Tesla)
             Yuguang Yue (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in April 2021, Thesis title: "Boosting Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms with Deep Probabilistic Models," Machine Learning Engineer at Twitter --> Applied Scientist at Amazon --> Founding member of technical staff at Elefant AI)
             Quan Zhang (Ph.D. in Statistics, Defended in July 2020, Thesis title: "Bayesian Modeling with Tractable Inference and Applications to Online Peer-to-Peer Lending," Assistant Professor at Michigan State University)
             Mingzhang Yin (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in May 2020, Thesis title: "Variational Methods with Dependence Structure," Postdoc at Columbia University Data Science Institute --> Assistant Professor at the University of Florida)
             Maurice Diesendruck (Ph.D. in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in May 2019, co-supervised with Dr. Sinead Williamson, Data Scientist at Ojo Labs --> Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft Research)
             Carlos T.P. Zanini (PhD in Statistics and Data Sciences, Defended in May 2019, co-supervised with Dr. Peter Müller, Professor Adjunto at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
  • Non-UT students that are collaborating with me:
             Zhibin Duan (Xidian)
             Xinyue Hu (Xidian)
             Yuxin Li (Xidian)
             Xinyang Liu (Xidian)
             Yishi Xu (Xidian)
  • Former students closely worked with me
             Ayan Acharya (Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn)
             Reza Armandpur (Apple)
             Wenchao Chen (Lecture at Xidian University)
             Yulai Cong (Associate Professor at Sun Yat-sen University)
             Siamak Zamani Dadaneh (Data Scientist at Apple)
             Dandan Guo (Professor at Jilin University)
             Ehsan Hajiramezanali (Research Scientist at Genentech)
             Long Tian (Lecture at Xidian University)
             Aaron Schein (Assistant Professor, University of Chicago)
             Chaojie Wang (Research Scientist, Skywork AI)
             Dongsheng Wang (Assistant Professor, Shenzhen University)
             Hao Zhang (Associate Professor at Xidian University)
             He Zhao (Research Scientist at Data61, CSIRO)

    • © June 2022 Mingyuan Zhou