Zhen Qin (Zoe)
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Zhen Qin

Zhen Qin 秦臻

I also go by Zoe.

Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Ohio State University

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Decentralized & Federated Learning Bilevel Optimization Multi-Objective Optimization
About

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University, advised by Prof. Jia (Kevin) Liu and Prof. Yingbin Liang.

My research focuses on optimization for machine learning, with particular interests in decentralized and federated learning, bilevel optimization, and multi-objective optimization.

I am actively seeking research and applied science internship opportunities for Summer 2027. I am also happy to discuss research ideas and potential collaborations. Please feel free to reach out at qin.681@osu.edu.

Recent News
Sep. 2026 Open-sourced Muon Paper Agent,a customizable research agent for tracking and summarizing recent papers.
May 2026Glad to be selected as an ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer.
Apr. 2026Our paper “A Tale of Two Problems: Multi-Task Bilevel Learning Meets Equality Constrained Multi-Objective Optimization” has been accepted to ICML 2026.
May 2026Successfully passed the Ph.D. Candidacy Exam.
Jan. 2025Our paper “DUET: Decentralized Bilevel Optimization without Lower-Level Strong Convexity” has been accepted to ICLR 2025.
Oct. 2024Successfully passed the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam.
Selected Publications
ICLR 2025

DUET: Decentralized Bilevel Optimization without Lower-Level Strong Convexity

Zhen Qin, Zhuqing Liu, Songtao Lu, Yingbin Liang, Jia Liu

International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025

Paper ↗
ICML 2026

A Tale of Two Problems: Multi-Task Bilevel Learning Meets Equality Constrained Multi-Objective Optimization

Zhiyao Zhang, Myeung Suk Oh, Zhen Qin, Jiaxiang Li, Xin Zhang, Jia Liu

International Conference on Machine Learning, 2026

Paper ↗
Open Source
Research Tool

Muon Paper Agent

A lightweight open-source research agent for automatically finding, ranking, and summarizing recent arXiv papers, with a daily digest delivered to Slack.

It currently tracks Muon and spectral optimization, but is designed so that users can easily change the topic, keywords, and prompts to follow their own research interests.

GitHub ↗
Experience

Teaching Assistant

The Ohio State University

ECE 8101: Nonconvex Optimization for Machine Learning
Instructor: Prof. Jia (Kevin) Liu

Fall 2026

Graduate Research Associate

The Ohio State University

Aug. 2023 – Present
Professional Services

Conference Reviewer: AISTATS 2024–2027, ICLR 2025, 2027, ICML 2026 (Gold Reviewer)

Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

Education

The Ohio State University

Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Expected 2028

University of Southern California

M.A. in Applied Mathematics

2021

Lanzhou University

B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics

2018