Qi Zhang

Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
Data Science Program, Artificial Intelligence Program
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Email: qzhang9 at wpi.edu
Office: Unity Hall 355

I am an assistant professor at WPI working on building collaborative AI agents. My research interests are in formalisms, theories, and algorithms of single- and multi-agent planning and reinforcement learning.

Prior to WPI, I was an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina from 2020 to 2025. I completed my PhD at the University of Michigan in 2020.

I am looking for PhD students and visiting researchers to join my group.

Teaching

CS 525 | DS 595 - ST: Multi-Agent Decision Making [Fall 2025]
CS 539 - Machine Learning [Spring 2026]

Selected Papers (Google Scholar)

Efficient Information Sharing for Training Decentralized Multi-Agent World Models [link]
(RL Conference 2025) Xiaoling Zeng, Qi Zhang

Convergence Rates of Bayesian Network Policy Gradient for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning [link]
(NeurIPS 2024 BDU Workshop) Dingyang Chen, Zhenyu Zhang, Xiaolong Kuang, Xinyang Shen, Ozalp Ozer, Qi Zhang

Reinforcement Learning with Euclidean Data Augmentation for State-Based Continuous Control [arXiv]
(NeurIPS 2024) Jinzhu Luo, Dingyang Chen, Qi Zhang

Efficient Sequential Decision Making with Large Language Models [arXiv]
(EMNLP 2024) Dingyang Chen, Qi Zhang, Yinglun Zhu

E(3)-Equivariant Actor-Critic Methods for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning [arXiv]
(ICML 2024) Dingyang Chen, Qi Zhang

Subgoal Proposition Using a Vision-Language Model [link]
(IROS 2023 LangRob Workshop) Jianhai Su, Qi Zhang

Context-Aware Bayesian Network Actor-Critic Methods for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning [arXiv, link]
(ICML 2023) Dingyang Chen, Qi Zhang

Convergence and Price of Anarchy Guarantees of the Softmax Policy Gradient in Markov Potential Games [arXiv]
(Preprint) Dingyang Chen, Qi Zhang, Thinh T. Doan
(Presented at workshops at ICML 2022)

Communication-Efficient Actor-Critic Methods for Homogeneous Markov Games [link]
(ICLR 2022) Dingyang Chen, Yile Li, Qi Zhang

Semantics and Algorithms for Trustworthy Commitment Achievement under Model Uncertainty [link]
(JAAMAS, 2020) Qi Zhang, Edmund Durfee, Satinder Singh

Learning to Communicate and Solve Visual Blocks-World Tasks [pdf]
(AAAI 2019) Qi Zhang, Richard Lewis, Satinder Singh, Edmund Durfee