Zhiyu An
Hi! I'm a Postdoctoral Scholar at UC Merced. I focus on advancing reinforcement learning (RL) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems for smart building and agricultural applications. I aim to develop robust, uncertainty-aware, and transparent systems that support energy security and climate resilience.
I received my Ph.D. from UC Merced, where I was advised by Wan Du. I was a visiting researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and before that, I completed my undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley.
You can find my work in top venues across AI and IoT including ICLR, AAAI, DAC, KDD, L4DC, BuildSys, and IEEE IoT-J. I received Best Paper Award Runner-Up at BuildSys 2023 and Best Paper Award at HICSS 2025.
Email: zan7 AT ucmerced.edu
Research Agenda
Click on one of the circles to highlight relevant publications Hover on paper to show bib.
- AAAI '26
- NeurIPS Workshop '25 Oral
- SIGIR Workshop '25
- ICLR '26
- L4DC '25
- KDD '24
- BuildSys '26
- IoTJ '25
- HICSS '25 Best Paper
- DAC '24
- BuildSys '23 Best Paper Runner-Up
- SenSys '23
News
- One paper accepted to ACM BuildSys 2026. See you in Alberta!
- One paper on noise-robust exploration for RL accepted to ICLR 2026.
- One first author paper on moral alignment of LLM agents using reasoning-level reinforcement learning accepted to AAAI 2026.
- Released newest work on noise-robust exploration for RL on arXiv.
- One first author paper on compositional generalization in language models accepted to NeurIPS 2025 workshops.
- Serving on the Program Committee of AAAI 2026.
- One first author paper on uncertainty quantification accepted to L4DC 2025.
- Received Best Paper Award at HICSS 2025.
- One first author paper now online at IEEE IoT-J.
Contact
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
School of Engineering
University of California, Merced
Address: #230V, SE2, 5200 N. Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343
Education
- Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Merced
- B.A. in Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
Services
Conference Reviewer
- AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI): 2026, 2027
- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA): 2026
- ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys): 2025
- IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS): 2025
Journal Reviewer
- Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, since 2026
- IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, since 2025
- ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare (HEALTH), since 2025
- Smart Health - Elsevier, since 2025
- IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (T-NSE), since 2024
- IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J), since 2024
Teaching
UC Merced
- CSE 030: Data Structures