PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Tong Zhang

Also known as 张潼, Zhang Tong

Tong Zhang is a machine learning researcher whose work links optimization theory with generative AI and language-model alignment. He studied mathematics and computer science at Cornell, earned a Stanford computer science Ph.D. in 1999, and worked at IBM, Yahoo, Google, Baidu and Tencent. His SVRG work with Rie Johnson offered a simpler analysis for stochastic optimization, while RAFT and LMFlow address generative-model alignment and foundation-model fine-tuning. R-Tuning and MiCRo won outstanding paper awards at NAACL 2024 and EMNLP 2025. As of October 2026, he is a professor of computer science at Illinois, working on LLM post-training, formal reasoning and agent learning.

Works
787
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

  1. 1999

    Cornell and Stanford degrees

    He earns a B.A. in mathematics and computer science at Cornell, then completes a Stanford Ph.D. in computer science in 1999. Afterward, he works at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and Yahoo Research in New York City; his career also includes work at Google, Baidu and Tencent.

  2. 2013–2014

    SVRG and Baidu's Big Data Lab

    In 2013, he and Rie Johnson introduce stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) for stochastic gradient descent in a NIPS paper. On smooth, strongly convex functions, SVRG matches SDCA and SAG's fast convergence rate with a simpler analysis. By November 2014, he is a professor of statistics at Rutgers University and head of Baidu Big Data Lab.

  3. 2017–2018

    Leading Tencent AI Lab

    In February 2017, he becomes Executive Director of Tencent AI Lab and leads more than 50 scientists in machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing. He leaves the post effective December 31, 2018.

  4. 2019–2020

    HKUST and an IEEE fellowship

    He joins HKUST in 2019 as a Chair Professor in its Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science & Engineering. In March 2019, he becomes a research partner at Sinovation Ventures and directs the Computer Perception and Intelligent Control Lab, jointly formed by Sinovation and HKUST. IEEE elects him a Fellow in its 2020 class for contributions to machine-learning algorithms.

  5. 2023

    RAFT and LMFlow

    He coauthors RAFT with Hanze Dong and colleagues in 2023; its reward model selects high-quality samples, then fine-tunes generative models on them for alignment. He also coauthors LMFlow with Shizhe Diao and colleagues, an extensible toolkit for fine-tuning and inference of large foundation models.

  6. 2024

    An NAACL paper award

    R-Tuning instructs large language models to say “I don't know” and wins an Outstanding Paper award at NAACL 2024. He coauthors it with Heng Ji and graduate students Yangyi Chen, Yi R. Fung and Xingyao Wang.

  7. 2025

    A MiCRo paper award

    At EMNLP 2025, he and Han Zhao coauthor MiCRo with students Jingyan Shen, Jiarui Yao, Rui Yang, Yifan Sun, Feng Luo and Rui Pan. The paper wins an Outstanding Paper award for mixture modeling and context-aware routing for personalized preference learning.

  8. Since 2024

    Professor at Illinois

    He joins the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2024 as a professor of computer science at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. His research includes LLM post-training and reward modeling, formal reasoning, and learning methods for web, multimodal and embodied agents. In September 2026, he and Johns Hopkins professor Shiqian Ma receive a combined $1 million NSF award for their project, MFAI: Mathematical Foundations of Structure-Aware Adaptive Machine Learning Algorithms.

Career

  1. Since 2024University of Illinois Urbana-ChampaignProfessor of Computer Science
  2. From 2019Sinovation VenturesResearch Partner
  3. From 2019Computer Perception and Intelligent Control LabDirector
  4. 2017–2018TencentExecutive Director
  5. IBM ResearchResearcher
  6. YahooResearcher
  7. Rutgers UniversityProfessor of Statistics
  8. BaiduHead

Education

  1. 1999Stanford UniversityPh.D. in computer science
  2. Cornell UniversityB.A. in mathematics and computer science

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 Tong Zhang. 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. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Tong Zhang. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  3. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Tong Zhang. 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.
  4. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Tong Zhang. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.

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 Tong Zhang yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Tong Zhang tongzhang-ml.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  2. Big Data Technology in the Era of Internet | HKUST CSE cse.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  3. Accelerating Stochastic Gradient Descent using Predictive Variance Reduction papers.nips.cc. Checked 22 October 2026.
  4. Tencent recruits AI expert to head Shenzhen lab | iTWire itwire.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  5. Tencent AI Lab Director Leaves | Synced syncedreview.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  6. Briefing: Former Tencent AI Lab head joins Sinovation Ventures | TechNode technode.com. Checked 22 October 2026.
  7. Two Professors and Two Alumni Elected 2020 IEEE Fellows | HKUST School of Engineering seng.hkust.edu.hk. Checked 22 October 2026.
  8. RAFT: Reward rAnked FineTuning for Generative Foundation Model Alignment arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  9. LMFlow: An Extensible Toolkit for Finetuning and Inference of Large Foundation Models arxiv.org. Checked 22 October 2026.
  10. Tong Zhang | Siebel School of Computing and Data Science | Illinois siebelschool.illinois.edu. Checked 22 October 2026.