Zaiwei Chen

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING, PURDUE UNIVERSITY

I am an Assistant Professor in the Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, where I was appointed as a Solberg Academic Excellence Scholar. I am also affiliated with the Institute for Control, Optimization and Networks (ICON).

Prior to joining Purdue, I was a CMI Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology. I hold a Ph.D. in Machine Learning, an M.S. in Mathematics, and an M.S. in Operations Research from the Georgia Institute of Technology. I received my B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Chu Kochen Honors College at Zhejiang University.

Research Interests

Reinforcement Learning
Multi-Agent Systems and Learning in Games
Stochastic Approximation
Concentration Inequalities
Stochastic Processes

Recent News

I will give a talk titled "Natural Policy Gradient: All Roads Lead Back to Bellman" at the "Frontiers in Stochastic Control and Reinforcement Learning" workshop at SIGMETRICS 2026.
Two papers accepted by ICML 2026:
- Natural Hypergradient Descent: Algorithm Design, Convergence Analysis, and Parallel Implementation [Paper]
- Bridging the Gap Between Average and Discounted TD Learning [Paper]
One paper accepted to SIGMETRICS 2026 (Best Paper Award Finalist):
- A Minimal-Assumption Analysis of Q-Learning with Time-Varying Policies [Paper]

Contact Information

Email: chen5252@purdue.edu
Office: Grissom Hall 264