Junyu Zhang

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Prof. Jiayuan Mao. Previously, I received my B.Eng. in Artificial Intelligence from the Honor Class at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and my M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I am fortunate to work under the supervision of Prof. Huan Zhang and Prof. Tong Zhang at UIUC, Prof. Paul Pu Liang at MIT, and Prof. Chongjie Zhang at Tsinghua University.

In the era of large-scale foundation models, my research goal is to incentivize the capabilities of pretrained models by empowering them to perform long-term reasoning and learn from interaction, thereby building scalable and generalizable AI for the open world. Toward this goal, my previous research primarily focused on:

• Large Language Models Reasoning: efficient and theoretically grounded reasoning; embodied spatial reasoning for agentic decision-making; mathematical reasoning with scalable evaluation.
• Learning from Interactions: empirical RL algorithms and their applications in robotics, including morphology–behavior co-optimization and robotic manipulation.

If you would like to discuss my research or potential collaborations further, feel free to contact me. I'm open to connect and collaborate with each other.