About me

Hi! I’m Zechen, a PhD student in Computer Science at Duke University advised by Ronald Parr. Previously, I was a research fellow in Computer Science at Brown University, working under the guidance of Amy Greenwald. Before that, I did my Master’s degree in Computational Science at EPFL & USI in Switzerland, where I conducted research under the guidance of Volkan Cevher. Prior to graduate school, I worked as a quantitative trader.

News

• Sept 18th, 2025: My first-author paper, A Unifying View of Linear Function Approximation in Off-Policy RL Through Matrix Splitting and Preconditioning, was accepted to NeurIPS 2025 as a Spotlight presentation (top 3% of submissions).

Research Interests

• Theoretical foundations of Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially for deep RL

• Theory of neural networks and transformers

• Continual learning and lifelong adaptation