Hongyang Zhang photo 

Hongyang Ryan Zhang
Assistant Professor
Northeastern University

Address: 177 Huntington Ave 2211, Boston, MA 02115

Email: ho.zhang@northeastern.edu
Our lab's GitHub

I am an assistant professor at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, working on machine learning and computer science, focusing on statistical foundations, algorithms, and optimization, with applications in networks, data mining, and language modeling. Here are several topics I have recently been working on: 1) Adaptation and transfer of neural networks, including multitask learning, fine-tuning, and in-context learning. 2) Learning from graph-structured data and geometric data, such as their sampling complexities. 3) Nonconvex optimization; matrix factorization. 4) Evaluation of AI and LLMs such as their mathematical and algorithmic reasoning capabilities.

I received my Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University and my B.Eng. in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Subsequently, I spent a year as a postdoc within the statistics and data science department at the University of Pennsylvania.

I enjoy working on technically challenging problems, while striving for broader impacts by creating new knowledge that will benefit the society, as well as fostering the next generation of engineers and researchers. I support accessible and reproducible research. If you are a student at Northeastern interested in my research, please feel free to email me.

Recent updates

  • Talk slides about our work on a Hessian view of learning.

  • New paper on a linear-time data selection algorithm for in-context learning.

  • An updated paper on transfer learning random matrices accepted at JMLR! We analyze a (classical) hard parameter sharing estimator and find that simply rebalancing the data leads to minimax optimal rates.

  • New manucript on an ensemble method for fine-tuning LLMs, built on top of LoRA.

  • A list of older logs.

Recent Services

Area Chair: ICML (2024-2025), AISTATS (2023-2026), ALT (2024), AAAI (2025-2026), Journal of Data-Centric Machine Learning Research (2024-).

Program Committee: COLT, NeurIPS, ICLR, ARR, FOCS, JMLR, TMLR, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

Conference Organization: INFORMS session organizer (2023-2025).