I am a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, New England (and New York City), where I am a member of the Reinforcement Learning Group. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT Institute for Foundations of Data Science in IDSS, and prior to this I received my PhD from the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University (2019), advised by Karthik Sridharan. I received my BS and MS in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 2014.

Research

I am interested in the mathematical foundations—algorithm design principles and fundamental limits—necessary to develop intelligent agents that learn from experience. I am currently most excited about:

The statistical and computational foundations of interactive decision making, including reinforcement learning and imitation learning.

Understanding and improving foundation models, from pre-training to post-training and test-time—particularly as a basis upon which to build interactive decision making agents.

More broadly, I like to dabble in almost all theoretical aspects of machine learning and adjacent topics (statistics, information theory, algorithms/complexity, optimization, …).

News

8/15/25: We will teach our course 9.522: Statistical Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making for the third time at MIT this Fall, with new content on RL for language models.

8/1/25: Adam Block, Max Simchowitz, and I will be presenting a NeurIPS 2025 tutorial, Foundations of Imitation Learning: From Language Modeling to Continuous Control.

7/4/25: We are organizing a workshop on Foundations of Reasoning in Language Models at NeurIPS 2025! The submission deadline is Sept 3, 2025.

7/1/25: Upcoming talks: July: EXAIT workshop at ICML, Aug: IAIFI Summer Workshop at Harvard, IFDS Summer Workshop at UW, Sept: Harvard Stats Colloquium

6/29/25: I was elected to the board of directors of the Association for Computational Learning for a four-year term.

5/10/25: We are organizing a workshop on Foundations of Post-Training at COLT 2025! The submission deadline is May 19, 2025.

Internships and Postdocs

I have been fortunate to work with the following amazing interns and postdocs at MSR:
Phil Amortila (2023), Adam Block (2023, PD ‘24-25), Fan Chen (2025), Noah Golowich (2022, PD ‘25-26), Audrey Huang (2024, 2025), Qinghua Liu (PD ‘24-25), Sadhika Malladi (PD ‘25-26), Nived Rajaraman (PD ‘25-), Dhruv Rohatgi (2024), Clayton Sanford (2023), Anikait Singh (2025), Yuda Song (2023), Jens Tuyls (2025), Andrew Wagenmaker (2022), Tengyang Xie (PD ‘23-24), Yunzong Xu (2021, PD ‘23-24), and Yinglun Zhu (2021).

Postdocs: For postdocs in AI/ML at MSR starting in 2026, apply here (theory) and here (empirical). The deadline is October 22, 2025.

Internships: For internships at MSR in spring and summer 2026, apply here.

Selected Papers

Selected Awards