About me

I am Dinghuai Zhang (张鼎怀), a senior researcher at Microsoft Research New England (since lots of people asked… New England is in US, not in England!). I have received my PhD training at Mila in Prof. Bengio’s group as well as Aaron’s Army (aka A.A.). During my PhD, I’ve interned at Apple MLR and FAIR labs. Previously, I was an undergraduate in School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University, working with Prof. Zhanxing Zhu and Prof. Bin Dong.

I am always open to possible discussion and research collaboration with junior students. Students from underrepresented groups are strongly encouraged to reach out! If you are interested, feel free to contact me by email, facebook, or wechat.

Research interests

I aim to tackle multidisciplinary problems with generative models and probabilistic methods.

• Multimodal modeling: tokenization, sequence modeling (autoregression & diffusion), etc
• Exploration with structure: RL, search, black-box optimization, active learning
• Scientific design & discovery as probabilistic inference

I’ve also conducted AI safety research (distribution shift, causal representation learning).

Activities

Organizer

• MSR New England Generative Modeling & Sampling Seminar (link).
• Safe Generative AI Workshop at NeurIPS 2024).
• Structured Probabilistic Inference & Generative Modeling (SPIGM) workshop at ICML 2023, ICML 2024, and NeurIPS 2025.
• FAI seminar (link).

Services

Area Chair of ICLR.
Reviewer of JMLR, TPAMI, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AISTATS, UAI, CLeaR, EMNLP.

Miscs

• I used to be a huge fan of Daido Moriyama and Henri Cartier-Bresson (street photography pioneers).
• I paint Chinese calligraphy well since a child.
• My Erdős number is 3.