John Luoyu Zhou
Hello! I'm a Computer Science Ph.D. student at UCLA, advised by Jonathan Kao. Previously, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University, where I was advised by Liam Paninski in the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience.
My primary research interests involve the recursive decomposition of complex, long-horizon tasks into simpler subproblems. I view hierarchical learning as both a structural prior that improves optimization in reinforcement learning and a framework for continual learning of increasingly sophisticated skills.
I spent my undergraduate studies and the first part of my Ph.D. studying neuroscience, investigating how the brain allocates control between model-free and model-based decision-making strategies and developing neural decoding applications.
Blog
-
May 2026How do we get better performance out of flow matching policies, given some scalar reward function?
-
Jan 2023A dive into the current state of brain-computer interfaces and open challenges in neural decoding and encoding. Inspired by my research on neural interfaces as well as Sword Art Online, a favorite childhood series of mine.
Research
-
May 2025We present Subgoal Advantage-Weighted Policy Bootstrapping (SAW), an offline goal-conditioned RL algorithm that distills subgoal-conditioned policies into longer-horizon goal-conditioned policies, achieving state-of-the-art performance on complex robotic locomotion and manipulation tasks.
-
May 2024Can we manipulate the rewards of other, simultaneously learning agents to encourage mutual cooperation in social dilemmas?
Previous Research
-
Jul 2022An open-source, drag-and-drop platform that uses cloud resources to run modern neuroscience data analyses.
-
Sep 2021A 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.
-
Mar 2021We elucidate the critical role of protein geranylgeranylation in regulating T lymphocyte migration and function.