Zilei Zoe Shao

I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Under the mentorship of Prof. Guy Van den Broeck in the StarAI Lab, my research focuses on improving the training efficiency and performance of deep generative models by integrating tractable probabilistic models into modern neural architectures. Additionally, I explore tokenization in Large Language Models (LLMs) as a neurosymbolic problem, with the goal of enhancing the tractability and reliability of these large-scale systems.

Before my doctoral studies, I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in a joint major of Computer Science and Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, where I was deeply involved in bounding-box inference within the context of model-based Reinforcement Learning under the supervision of Prof. Erin Talvitie.