Ruijie Zheng

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Furong Huang and Prof. Hal Daumé III. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics also from the University of Maryland, College Park. My research spans a variety of topics in reinforcement learning (RL), including model-based RL, transfer RL, adversarial RL, etc. My long-term goal is to make RL agents more robust and efficient.

In model-based RL, my work provided a novel insight into probabilistic environment model ensemble, which is commonly used in model-based RL algorithm. Based on the insight, we can substitute the ensemble with a single model and Lipschitz regularized value function to make the learning algorithm much more computationally efficient. For transfer-RL, I have worked on transferring domain knowledge under the drastic change of observation spaces (e.g., from vector-based observation to image-based observation). For adversarial RL, I have worked on observation attacks for the deep RL policy, as well as designing efficient algorithms to improve the agent’s robustness under attack. In addition, I have also worked on communication attacks in multi-agent reinforcement learning and developed a certifiable defense mechanism.

selected publications

  1. ICLR 2023
    Is Model Ensemble Necessary? Model-based RL via a Single Model with Lipschitz Regularized Value Function
    Zheng, Ruijie, Wang, Xiyao, Xu, Huazhe, and Huang, Furong
    In International Conference on Learning Representations 2023
    Spotlight Presentation at NeurIPS 2022 DeepRL Workshop
  2. ICLR 2023
    Certifiably Robust Policy Learning against Adversarial Multi-Agent Communication
    Sun, Yanchao, Zheng, Ruijie, Hassanzadeh, Parisa, Liang, Yongyuan, Feizi, Soheil, Ganesh, Sumitra, and Huang, Furong
    In International Conference on Learning Representations 2023
  3. ICLR 2022
    Who Is the Strongest Enemy? Towards Optimal and Efficient Evasion Attacks in Deep RL
    Sun, Yanchao, Zheng, Ruijie, Liang, Yongyuan, and Huang, Furong
    In International Conference on Learning Representations 2022
    Best Paper Award in NeurIPS 2021 Workshop of Safe and Robust Control of Uncertain Systems
  4. ICLR 2022
    Transfer RL across Observation Feature Spaces via Model-Based Regularization
    Sun, Yanchao, Zheng, Ruijie, Wang, Xiyao, Cohen, Andrew E, and Huang, Furong
    In International Conference on Learning Representations 2022