Zhuoyun Du

About Me

I am an incoming Ph.D. student at HKUST and currently a third-year M.Eng. student in Data Science at Zhejiang University, advised by Prof. Wei Chen at ZJUVAI. I received my B.Eng. in Computer Science from Jinan University. Previously, I was a research assistant at THUNLP, Tsinghua University, working with Prof. Zhiyuan Liu and Prof. Chen Qian. I also worked as a research intern at Alibaba Group and as a Talent Program intern at ByteDance.

I hope to build machine-native AI agents that develop or learn their own representations, communication protocols, coordination structures, and self-improvement mechanisms.

I am seeking research internship opportunities and welcome research collaborations. Contact me · Book a chat.

Research Interests

• Multi-agent collaboration: latent-space communication and reasoning, learned coordination.
• Agent evolution and evaluation: recursive self-improvement, interaction-driven learning, autonomous evaluation, and user simulation.
• Foundation models: model training, post-training, and novel architectures.

Selected Publications

* denotes equal contribution.

Experience

Talent Program Intern, Machine Learning Engineer, ByteDance (Mar. 2026 - Jul. 2026)

• Built the team's first data-flywheel rollout system for multi-turn, task-oriented dialogue, supporting downstream multi-turn dialogue RL and agentic RL.
• Designed a self-play simulation and evaluation environment with high-fidelity, persona-conditioned user-simulation agents for rollout generation and evaluation signals.
• Conducted post-training and preference alignment of large-scale LLMs (e.g., Qwen3.5-122B/397B) using SFT and RLHF/DPO, alongside autonomous agent-driven evaluation of dialogue policies.

Research Intern, Future Living Lab (now part of Token Foundry with Tingyi Lab), Alibaba Group (Jan. 2025 - Mar. 2026)

• Proposed Interlat (code), a latent-space communication framework that replaces natural-language message passing with temporally aligned hidden-state exchange.
• Designed a token-latent curriculum and learned compression scheme, achieving up to 24x communication speedup at comparable task performance.
• Gained hands-on experience with distributed training on 256+ GPUs; co-authored Online-PVLM, MemCoRL, and Learning to Evolve.

M.Eng. Research, State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University (Sept. 2024 - present)

• Led EvoPatient (code), an open-source doctor-patient coevolution system for virtual standardized patients, accepted to ACL 2025.
• Drove the project end-to-end, including research formulation, system implementation, medical-case curation, expert evaluation, and paper writing.
• Improved patient-answer ability from 0.763 to 0.860 after 200 training cases.

Research Assistant, THUNLP, Tsinghua University (Dec. 2023 - Aug. 2024)

• Worked with Prof. Zhiyuan Liu and Prof. Chen Qian on ChatDev-based multi-agent collaboration, studying role organization, information exchange, and coordination.
• Led Croto (code), designing cross-team orchestration with parallel teams, hierarchy partitioning, and greedy aggregation for multi-agent software development.
• Contributed to MACNet (code) and iAgent (code); related OpenBMB/ChatDev projects have accumulated over 33k GitHub stars.

Awards and Honors

• 2026: Outstanding Graduate Student.
• 2025: National Scholarship (awarded to ∼2% of master’s students nationwide annually); Outstanding Graduate Student.
• 2024: First-Class Scholarship for Outstanding Graduates.
• Undergraduate: Three undergraduate scholarships.

Academic Service

• Reviewer: NeurIPS 2025, ICLR 2026.

Miscellaneous

Beyond research, I enjoy soccer, fencing, snowboarding, billiards, ballroom dancing, piano, photography, and physics.