Tongtian Zhu
"Convince future generations, not just peers."
Hi there 😃. I am Tongtian Zhu (prounced as “Tong-tee-an Joo”), a Ph.D. candidate at the Computer Science Department of Zhejiang University (ZJU), supervised by Professors Can Wang and Chun Chen. If you have matched opportunities, questions, or are interested in collaborating, or just want to chat, please always feel free to contact me via email or WeChat.
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🦄 Research Interest
“Seek truth and beauty.”
Currently, my research lies at the intersection of these two directions:
- Decentralized learning (e.g., generalization, training dynamics, data influence, communication allocation, benchmarking);
- Science of learning (e.g., symmetries, training dynamics/implicit bias, emergence of mergeability);
🔥 News
Aug 9, 2025 | I will be in Beijing to give a talk at the student forum of The China conference on Scientific Machine Learning (CSML) about our DICE paper! |
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May 10, 2025 | Our paper “Lie Symmetry Net: Preserving Conservation Laws in Modelling Financial Market Dynamics” is accpeted at TMLR 🎉! |
Apr 24, 2025 |
I’ll be in Singapore 🦁🌴 this April for ICLR 2025! Can’t wait to meet new and old friends. Ping me if you’d like to chat ☕️!
I’ll be presenting our DICE paper at:
📍 Hall 3 + Hall 2B, #337 🗓️ April 24, 10:00 AM
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Jan 23, 2025 | Our paper “DICE: Data Influence Cascade in Decentralized Learning” (🔗twitter threads, project page, video-Chinese, video-English) is accpeted at ICLR 2025 🎉! |
Jul 20, 2024 | Very excited to attend ICML this time 😀! Feel free to reach out if you want to chat ☕️, whether it’s about deep learning theory (generalization, symmetries, training dynamics), decentralized learning (decentralized economies, privacy), or anything else.✨ |
Jun 1, 2024 | I give an invited talk (slides, paper) at CCF Excellent PhD Forum on Theoretical Computer Science on our DSGD-SAM paper! |
Apr 25, 2023 |
Our paper “Decentralized SGD and Average-direction SAM are Asymptotically Equivalent” is accpeted at ICML 2023!
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May 17, 2022 | Our paper “Topology-aware Generalization of Decentralized SGD” is accepted at ICML 2022 (Spotlight)! |
📝 Selected Publications
- ICLR 2025DICE: Data Influence Cascade in Decentralized LearningIn International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025
📚 Academic Services
- Journal Reviewer: IEEE TPAMI; IEEE TIT.
- Conference Reviewer: ICLR 2024, 2025; ICML 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025; NeurIPS 2022, 2023, 2024; CVPR 2025; AISTATS 2023, 2024; UAI 2023, 2024; ECML 2023; ACML 2022.
🤗 Miscellaneous
- I was an amateur artist (or more accurately, an enthusiast), spending more than five years practicing my sketching skills. My dream was to become a manga artist ("漫画家" in Chinese). I firmly believe that he aesthetic sensibility nurtured through my fine arts studies considerably enhances my research.
- I'm also a huge basketball fanatic! I have a profound love for basketball, particularly for the intrinsic beauty of the sport itself. I'm planning (possibly in 1 or 2 years) to start a blog series about the basics of basketball (e.g., rules, skills and tactics) through the lens of scientific research. Any comments are welcome!