PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Haipeng Luo

Haipeng Luo is a computer scientist who works on online learning, bandit algorithms and reinforcement learning for AI systems that learn from sequential interaction. He studied at Peking University and earned a Princeton PhD in 2016 under Rob Schapire, and two papers he coauthored won best paper awards at ICML 2015 and NIPS 2015. After a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, he joined the University of Southern California as an assistant professor in 2017, won an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, and won the COLT 2021 best paper award with his student Chen-Yu Wei for a black-box method for reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments. He is an associate professor and IBM Early Career Chair in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at USC, where his research aims to develop the foundations of continually learning AI systems.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2007–2016

    Peking University and Princeton

    He studies at Peking University from 2007 to 2011. At Princeton, he is advised by Rob Schapire and works closely with Elad Hazan, and his 2016 PhD dissertation is titled Optimal and Adaptive Online Learning.

  2. 2015

    Two best paper awards

    In 2015, he coauthors two best-paper winners. Optimal and Adaptive Algorithms for Online Boosting, written with Alina Beygelzimer and Satyen Kale, wins at ICML 2015, and Fast Convergence of Regularized Learning in Games, written with Vasilis Syrgkanis, Alekh Agarwal and Robert Schapire, wins at NIPS 2015.

  3. 2016–2023

    Microsoft Research, then USC

    He spends a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, from July 2016 to June 2017. In July 2017, he joins the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California as an assistant professor, a post he holds until February 2023. His research there centers on online learning, bandit algorithms and reinforcement learning, and his PhD student Chen-Yu Wei, who works with him from 2017 to 2022, becomes an assistant professor at the University of Virginia.

  4. 2018

    COLT best student paper

    In 2018, he wins the COLT Best Student Paper Award with Dylan Foster, Satyen Kale, Mehryar Mohri and Karthik Sridharan for Logistic Regression: The Importance of Being Improper.

  5. 2020–2022

    NSF CAREER and Google awards

    He receives an NSF CAREER Award and a Google Faculty Research Award in 2020. In 2022, he receives a Google Research Scholar Award.

  6. 2021

    A COLT 2021 best paper

    In 2021, he and PhD student Chen-Yu Wei win the COLT best paper award for Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning without Prior Knowledge: An Optimal Black-box Approach. The method turns any stationary reinforcement learning algorithm into one that learns optimally in a non-stationary environment.

  7. Since February 2023

    Associate professor and IBM chair

    He becomes an associate professor at USC in February 2023 and holds the IBM Early Career Chair in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science. His research aims to develop the foundations of continually learning AI systems, in which agents acquire knowledge through sequential interaction and adapt to non-stationary or even adversarial environments.

  8. July 2025–July 2026

    Google visiting faculty researcher

    He is a Google Visiting Faculty Researcher from July 2025 to July 2026, after serving as an Amazon Visiting Academic from September 2022 to January 2025.

Career

  1. Since 2017University of Southern CaliforniaAssistant Professor, Associate Professor and IBM Early Career Chair
  2. 2025–2026GoogleVisiting Faculty Researcher
  3. 2022–2025AmazonVisiting Academic
  4. 2016–2017Microsoft ResearchPostdoctoral Researcher

Education

  1. 2016Princeton UniversityPhD
  2. 2011Peking University

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Haipeng Luo. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Haipeng Luo. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of Southern California. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. Universities had a net outflow of 2,068 moves in AI careersIncludes University of Southern California. Our estimates of career flows and median h-index across universities and companies in AI, including the role of joint appointments and earlier academic jobs.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Haipeng Luo yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Haipeng Luo: Biography haipeng-luo.net. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Haipeng Luo haipeng-luo.net. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Haipeng Luo - The Mathematics Genealogy Project mathgenealogy.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Awards | ICML Lille icml.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. NIPS 2015 Awards neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Best Paper Award at ICML for Haipeng Luo | CS cs.princeton.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Haipeng Luo - USC Viterbi Faculty Directory viterbi.usc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Haipeng Luo - Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing simons.berkeley.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Haipeng Luo: Group Members haipeng-luo.net. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Haipeng Luo: Awards haipeng-luo.net. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Bringing Reinforcement Learning to a Dynamic World: USC Computer Scientists Win Best Paper Award viterbischool.usc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. COLT 2021 - Paper Awards learningtheory.org. Checked 21 October 2026.