Zhehang Du

I am a second-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, advised by Prof. Weijie Su. Previously, I received a BS in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics from the University of Science and Technology of China and interned at Microsoft Research Asia under the supervision of Huishuai Zhang.

My research focuses on optimization and the mathematical foundations of modern AI systems. I am interested in developing principled methods for understanding, training, and improving large-scale learning systems, with a growing interest in new architectures such as world models.

Selected Papers

My research publications are listed on Google Scholar.

• The Newton-Muon Optimizer. arXiv, 2026. Blog post
• Uncovering Symmetry Transfer in Large Language Models via Layer-Peeled Optimization. arXiv, 2026.
• A benchmark of expert-level academic questions to assess AI capabilities. Nature, 2026.