Banghua Zhu
About meI'm a final-year Ph.D. student at the Department of EECS, University of California, Berkeley. I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Jiantao Jiao and Prof. Michael I. Jordan. I'm a recipient of the 2023 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize from Berkeley EECS for truly outstanding PhD research. I'm affiliated with Berkeley AI Research (BAIR), Berkeley Laboratory for Information and System Sciences (BLISS) and the Center for the Theoretical Foundations of Learning, Inference, Information, Intelligence, Mathematics and Microeconomics at Berkeley (CLIMB). Prior to Berkeley, I received B.S. in Eletronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2018. In 2017, I spent a wonderful summer at Stanford, working with Prof. David Tse. From Jan 2022 to Nov 2022, I worked as a student researcher at Google Robotics. From Mar 2023 to July 2023, I worked as a research intern at the Knowledge and Language Team in Microsoft Research. I'm on the 2023-2024 academic job market! ResearchI work on statistics, information theory and machine learning, with applications on foundation models, game theory, robust statistics, reinforcement learning and human-AI interactions. Checkout our recent open 7B model, Starling-7B, which ranks first in all existing 7B models according to human evaluation in Chatbot Arena! Starling-7B is trained with our open-source high-quality preference dataset, Nectar, using our new reward training and policy-finetuning algorithms. We have also open-sourced NexusRaven-V2-13B, a function-calling model that surpasses GPT-4 in generic function calling tasks, along with our Huggingface function calling leaderboard. Main research Interests:
Besides the topics above, I am also actively working on the following research areas:
Awards1. 2023 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize 2. 1st place, 2019 Stanford Citadel Datathon 3. Berkeley EECS Award for Undergraduate Researcher Mentoring 4. Berkeley EECS Department Award 5. Beijing Excellent Undergrad Award 6. Qualcomm Scholarship |