About me

I am a PhD student at Mila and Polytechnique Montréal, supervised by Prof. Sarath Chandar. I completed my masters study at the University of Alberta, where I was supervised by Prof. Adam White. Previously I interned at Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab with Yangchen Pan. I also interned at Deepmind Montréal with Daniel Toyama.

My research interests span reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, and foundation models. I am particularly interested in developing autonomous agents that can efficiently coordinate with other agents to accomplish complex tasks.

Publications

• Conditionally optimistic exploration for cooperative deep multi-agent reinforcement learning
  Xutong Zhao, Yangchen Pan, Chenjun Xiao, Sarath Chandar, Janarthanan Rajendran
  UAI 2023
  paper, code

• Towards Few-shot Coordination: Revisiting Ad-hoc Teamplay Challenge In the Game of Hanabi
  Hadi Nekoei, Xutong Zhao, Janarthanan Rajendran, Miao Liu, Sarath Chandar
  CoLLAs 2023
  paper, code

• Adaptive Memory Module for Sequential Planning and Reasoning
  Kshitij Gupta, Sean Spinney, Xutong Zhao, Janarthanan Rajendran, Patricia Conrod, Irina Rish, Sarath Chandar
  In submission

• No More Pesky Hyperparameters: Offline Hyperparameter Tuning for RL
  Han Wang, Archit Sakhadeo, Adam M White, James M Bell, Vincent Liu, Xutong Zhao, Puer Liu, Tadashi Kozuno, Alona Fyshe, Martha White
  TMLR 2022
  paper

• An Empirical Study of Model-Free Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning
  MSc thesis. Parts of this thesis are to be submitted as a journal paper.
  link

Experience

• Research Assistant @ Mila, Sep.2021 - present
• Intern @ Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab Toronto, Aug.2022 - Dec.2022
• Research Assistant @ University of Alberta RLAI lab, Sep.2019 - Aug.2021
• Intern @ DeepMind Montréal, Jun.2019 - Aug.2019

Teaching

• INF8953DE: Reinforcement learning, Polytechnique Montréal. Fall 2021
• CMPUT 397: Reinforcement learning, University of Alberta. Winter 2020, Fall 2019