I am currently a MPhil student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), under the supervision of Prof. Renzhi Lu. I received my B.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from HUST in 2024.

Previously, I worked as an intern at TikTok, ByteDance. Before that, I conducted research on facial micro-expression recognition under the supervision of Prof. Xiang Xiang. Before that, I also explored defocus blur detection, advised by Prof. Hao Lu.

What am I doing?

My research primarily focuses on reinforcement learning (RL), with the goal of endowing RL agents with truly intelligent capabilities. Specifically, I am interested in:

• Enabling RL agents to autonomously learn rewards, similar to how humans do (accepted by Nature Communications)

• Developing more accurate value function estimations to support decision-making (under review at TPAMI)

• Designing RL-specific optimizers to accelerate training and improve efficiency (ongoing work)

I am also interested in the industrial applications of RL, such as recommendation systems, ad bidding, and generative RL.

If you want to contact me, or if you are interested in collaborating with me, please drop me an e-mail using my Gmail: zongheshao17[AT]gmail.com.

News

• [2025.10] One paper accepted by Nature Communications !
• [2024.07] One paper accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics !

Publications

machine learning

• A Novel Data-Driven LSTM-SAF Model for Power Systems Transient Stability Assessment.
  Zonghe Shao, Qichao Wang, Yuzhe Cao, Defu Cai, Yang You & Renzhi Lu.
  IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 2024 (IF=11.3)

reinforcement learning

• Discovery of the reward function for embodied reinforcement learning agents.
  Renzhi Lu, Zonghe Shao, Yuemin Ding, Ruijuan Chen, Dongrui Wu, Housheng Su, Tao Yang, Fumin Zhang, Jun Wang, Yang Shi, Zhong-Ping Jiang, Han Ding & Hai-Tao Zhang.
  Nature Communications, 2025

Educations

• 2024 - 2027, Mphil, School of Artificial Intelligence and Automation, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
• 2020 - 2024, Bachelor, Artificial Intelligence, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

Internships

• TikTok, Bytedance (2025.04 - 2025.10)

  Researched on RL4Rec

Teaching

• Python Language Design by Prof. Renzhi Lu, Autumn 2024, 2025. (Teaching Assistant)
• Data Science by Prof. Renzhi Lu, Autumn 2024, 2025. (Teaching Assistant)