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 primary interests are in optimization and the mathematical foundations of modern AI systems. I study how these systems learn, reason, and fail, while also exploring applications of this understanding to language-model training, evaluation, AI safety, and new architectures such as world models.

Selected Papers

My research publications are listed on Google Scholar.

• The Newton-Muon Optimizer. arXiv, 2026. Blog post
• A benchmark of expert-level academic questions to assess AI capabilities. Nature, 2026.