Hi there, I’m Zhe Zeng. I am an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Virginia, starting in Fall 2025. My research interests lie broadly in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with recent focus on neurosymbolic AI and probabilistic ML. I aim to enable and support decision-making in the real world in the presence of probabilistic uncertainty and symbolic knowledge (graph structures, logical, arithmetic, and physical constraints, etc) to achieve trustworthy AI and aid scientific discoveries. My current work can be roughly catalogued as:

• Reasoning: probabilistic inference, tractable probabilistic models
• Learning: constrained deep learning, graph machine learning, weakly supervised learning
• Trustworthiness: explainability, uncertainty quantification, domain-knowledge incorporation

Currently, I am a Faculty Fellow in the Computer Science Department at New York University (NYU), hosted by Prof. Andrew Gordon Wilson. I obtained my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2024, where I was lucky to be advised by Prof. Guy Van den Broeck as a member of the Statistical and Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI) Lab, and my B.S. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at Zhejiang University in 2018. I received the Amazon Doctoral Student Fellowship in 2022 and the NEC Student Research Fellowship in 2021, and was selected for the Rising Stars in EECS in 2023.

📢 Prospective students: I have open, fully-funded PhD positions in Fall 2025 or later, and am also looking for interns/visiting students. If you would like to work with me at any levels, feel free to reach out by email, specifying in the subject the position you are looking for: [PhD], [Internship], or [Visiting].

📩 Email: zhezengzz [at] gmail [dot] com