Cyril Zhang

Hi! I'm a researcher at Microsoft Research NYC. (We're hiring!) My work weaves between the theory, empirical science, and pragmatic design of learning algorithms. In an immediate research capacity, I care about:

In other capacities, I care about fairness, alignment, intersectionality, and boundary objects.

Bringing these together, I'm currently particularly obsessed with planning, reasoning, and abstraction in deep sequence models. I'd like to see these done more directly, reliably, and efficiently. With a superb set of collaborators, I've been building out mental models for how to learn the right circuits in today's non-convex and non-stochastic world.

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Princeton, under the supervision of Prof. Elad Hazan, where we worked on convexifying non-convex problems in filtering and control. For the latter half of that wonderful adventure, I was a student researcher at Google AI, where we worked on the theory and design of large-scale optimizers. Before that, I completed a B.S. in Computer Science at Yale, and grew up in Toronto.

Publications

With Adam Block, Dylan Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy, and Max Simchowitz.
With Akanksha Saran, Jacob Alber, Danielle Bragg, and John Langford.
With Benjamin L. Edelman, Surbhi Goel, Sham Kakade, and Eran Malach.
With Bingbin Liu, Jordan T. Ash, Surbhi Goel, and Akshay Krishnamurthy.
With Sham Kakade, Akshay Krishnamurthy, and Gaurav Mahajan.
With Bingbin Liu, Jordan T. Ash, Surbhi Goel, and Akshay Krishnamurthy.
With Surbhi Goel, Sham Kakade, and Adam Kalai.
With Boaz Barak, Benjamin L. Edelman, Surbhi Goel, Sham Kakade, and Eran Malach.
With Benjamin L. Edelman, Surbhi Goel, and Sham Kakade.
With Nikunj Saunshi, Jordan T. Ash, Surbhi Goel, Dipendra Misra, Sanjeev Arora, Sham Kakade, and Akshay Krishnamurthy.
With Yonathan Efroni, Sham Kakade, and Akshay Krishnamurthy.
With Jordan T. Ash, Surbhi Goel, Akshay Krishnamurthy, and Sham Kakade.
With Naman Agarwal and Surbhi Goel.
With Daniel Suo, Naman Agarwal, Wenhan Xia, Xinyi Chen, Udaya Ghai, Alex Yu, Paula Gradu, Karan Singh, Edgar Minasyan, Julienne LaChance, Tom Zajdel, Manuel Schottdorf, Daniel Cohen, and Elad Hazan.
With Paula Gradu, John Hallman, Daniel Suo, Alex Yu, Naman Agarwal, Udaya Ghai, Karan Singh, Anirudha Majumdar, and Elad Hazan.
With Naman Agarwal, Rohan Anil, Tomer Koren, and Kunal Talwar.
With Udaya Ghai, Holden Lee, Karan Singh, and Yi Zhang.
With Mark Braverman, Xinyi Chen, Sham Kakade, Karthik Narasimhan, and Yi Zhang.
With Xinyi Chen, Naman Agarwal, Elad Hazan, and Yi Zhang.
With Naman Agarwal, Rohan Anil, Elad Hazan, and Tomer Koren.
With Naman Agarwal, Brian Bullins, Xinyi Chen, Elad Hazan, Karan Singh, and Yi Zhang.
With Elad Hazan, Holden Lee, Karan Singh, and Yi Zhang.
With Brian Bullins and Yi Zhang.
With Sanjeev Arora, Elad Hazan, Holden Lee, Karan Singh, and Yi Zhang.
With Elad Hazan and Karan Singh.
With Elad Hazan and Karan Singh.
With Matthew Giguere, Debra Fischer, Jaymie Matthews, Chris Cameron, and Gregory Henry.