John Luoyu Zhou

Hello! I'm a PhD student in the Neuroscience Interdepartmental Program (NSIDP) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at UCLA, advised by Jonathan Kao. I received my BS in computer science from Columbia University, where I was advised by Liam Paninski in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.

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Current Research

I am interested in unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that can capture the geometric structure of the world from experience, and utilize this knowledge to rapidly learn goal-directed behaviors.

Flattening Hierarchies with Policy Bootstrapping

We present Subgoal Advantage-Weighted Policy Bootstrapping (SAW), an offline goal-conditioned RL algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex, long-horizon tasks without needing hierarchical policies or generative subgoal models.

Reciprocal Reward Influence Encourages Cooperation From Self-Interested Agents

We propose a form of intrinsic motivation to reciprocate the influence of other agents’ actions on one’s own return, and show that this is sufficient to encourage mutual cooperation from other, self-interested agents in sequential social dilemmas.

Previous Research

Neuroscience Cloud Analysis As a Service

An open-source, drag-and-drop platform that uses cloud resources to run modern neuroscience data analyses.

Partitioning variability in animal behavioral videos using semi-supervised variational autoencoders

A semi-supervised framework that combines the output of supervised pose estimation algorithms with unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods to produce interpretable, low-dimensional representations of behavioral videos.

A Requirement of Protein Geranylgeranylation for Chemokine Receptor Signaling and Th17 Cell Function in an Animal Model of Multiple Sclerosis

We elucidate the critical role of protein geranylgeranylation in regulating T lymphocyte migration and function.

Writing

A Full Dive

An article that takes a dive into the current state of brain-computer interfaces and open challenges in neural decoding and encoding. Inspired by my research as well as Sword Art Online, one of my favorite childhood anime series.

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website