Z. Sun

Z. Sun

Assistant Professor @ SUFE

Research Profile

Machine Learning · Probabilistic AI

Zhuo Sun

Tenure-track Assistant Professor
School of Statistics and Data Science, SUFE

I develop efficient, reliable, and scalable learning algorithms, with a focus on reinforcement learning, foundation models, probabilistic machine learning, and efficient inference.

Portrait of Zhuo Sun
Visiting Researcher Imperial College London
Academic Service Area Chair / PC ICML · ICLR · NeurIPS · AISTATS · UAI
Recognition Best Paper · Oral · Spotlight

About

I received my Ph.D. from University College London, supervised by Prof. François-Xavier Briol and Prof. Jing-Hao Xue. I completed my M.Sc. at the University of Oxford, supervised by Prof. George Deligiannidis and mentored by Prof. Gesine Reinert.

Reinforcement Learning Foundation Models Probabilistic ML Efficient Inference

News

  • Sep 2026 — 3 papers are accepted to NeurIPS 2026!
  • Jun 2026 — Interdomain Attention: Beyond Token-Level Key-Value Memory is released on arXiv and selected as a Spotlight Paper at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Foundations of Deep Generative Models.
  • Apr 2026 — 1 paper is accepted to ICML 2026!
  • Feb 2026 — Information Shapes Koopman Representation is selected as an Oral Paper at ICLR 2026!
  • Jan 2026 — 3 papers are accepted to ICLR 2026!

Publications & Preprints

* equal contribution; ✉ corresponding author

Stay tuned, more RL for LLMs and Agentic RL works are on the way.

arxiv
2026
Sun, Z.; Li, E.; Zhao, Y.; Cheng, X.; Yuan, W.; Li, K.; Liu, C.; Liu, H.; Zhu, H. B. H.; Zeng, L. (2026+). SR-OPSD: Self-Referenced On-Policy Self-Distillation arxiv. arXiv
arxiv
2026
Cheng, X.*; Yuan, W.*; Mu, Z.; Zhang, Y.; Yang, Y.; Wang, H.; Sun, Z.✉; Liu, C.✉ (2026). Scaling World-Model Reinforcement Learning Through Diffusion Policy Optimization arxiv. arXiv
arxiv
2026
Zhao, Y.*; Cheng, X.*; Liu, H.*; He, B.; Zhang, Xin.; Zhu, H.; Chen, W.; Zeng, L.; Sun, Z.✉ (2026). Saliency-Aware Regularized Quantization Calibration for Large Language Models arxiv. arXiv
arxiv
2026
Kiyohara, N.*; Zhu, BH.*; Hassanin, R.*; Chen, WL.; Bhatt, S.; Sun, Z.✉; Li, YZ. (2026). Interdomain Attention: Beyond Token-Level Key-Value Memory arxiv. arXiv ICML 2026 Workshop on Foundations of Deep Generative Models, Spotlight Paper
NeurIPS
2026
Cheng, X*; Wang, H.*; Yuan, W.; Wang, Z.; Chen, Z.; Zeng, L.; Sun, Z.✉ (2026). Fisher Decorator: Refining Flow Policy via A Local Transport Map In The Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026. arXiv
NeurIPS
2026
Yang, Y.; Cheng, X.; He, Y.; Li, K.; Yuan W.; Sun, Z.✉ (2026). Outlier-Robust Diffusion Posterior Sampling for Bayesian Inverse Problems In The Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026. arXiv
NeurIPS
2026
Guo, S.*; Cheng, X.*; Sun, Z.*✉ (2026). Random-Projection Tree Stein Variational Gradient Descent In The Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026. arXiv
ICML
2026
Cheng, X.*; Yuan, W.*; Li, B.; Xu, Y.; Yang, Y.; Liang, H.; Peng, B.; Loftin, R.; Sun, Z.; Hu, Y. (2026). How Does the Lagrangian Guide Safe Reinforcement Learning through Diffusion Models? In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026). arXiv
ICLR
2026
Li, K.; Yang, Y.; Chen, X.; He, Y.; Sun, Z.✉ (2026). Multilevel Control Functional. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026). arXiv With Score 8,8,8 (Rank 2nd over 19000 submissions)
ICLR
2026
Cheng, X.; Yuan, W.; Yang, Y.; Zhang, Y.; Cheng, S.; He, Y.; Sun, Z.✉ (2026). Information Shapes Koopman Representation. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026). arXiv Selected for Oral Presentation (top 1.18%)
ICLR
2026
Cheng, X.; Yang, Y.; Jiang, W.; Yuan, C.; Sun, Z.; Hu, Y. (2026). From Embedding to Control: Representations for Stochastic Multi-Object Systems. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026). arXiv
UAI
2023
Sun, Z.; Oates, C. J; Briol, F-X. (2023). Meta-learning Control Variates: Variance Reduction with Limited Data. In Proceedings of the 39th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2023). Selected for Oral Presentation (top 3%)
ICML'W
2023
Li, K.*; Sun, Z.*✉ (2023). Multilevel Control Functional (Short Version). In ICML 2023 SPIGM.
ICML
2023
Sun, Z.; Barp, A.; Briol, F.-X. (2023). Vector-valued Control Variates. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023). ASA SBSS Best Student Paper (2022)
AISTATS
2021
Sun, Z.; Wu, J.; Li, X.; Yang, W.; Xue, J-H. (2021). Amortized Bayesian Prototype Meta-learning: A new probabilistic meta-learning approach to few-shot image classification. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics(AISTATS 2023).
Neurocomputing
2021
Li, X.*; Sun, Z.*; Xue, J-H. ; Ma, Z. (2021). A Concise Review of Recent Few-shot Meta-learning Methods. Neurocomputing. arXiv
IEEE TIP
2020
Li, X.*; Wu, J.*; Sun, Z.*; Ma, Z. ; Cao, J.; Xue, J-H. (2020). Bi-Similarity Network for Fine-grained Few-shot Image Classification. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. arXiv