About me

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Center of Foundational Artificial Intelligence of University College London, supervised by François-Xavier Briol and Arthur Gretton. I am interested in understanding machine learning algorithms through the dual lenses of optimization and generalization. My current research focuses on generative models, Monte Carlo methods, and causal inference. Prior to my PhD, I obtained my bachelor's degree from the department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, 2022.
I organize the JumpTrading/ELLIS CSML seminar series on Computational Statistics and Machine Learning for the UCL ELLIS Unit. Feel free to drop me an email if you would like to give a talk!

Recent News

📌 March 2026: Research visit to Weijie Su at the University of Pennsylvania.
📌 March 2026: Research visit to Pradeep Ravikumar at the Carnegie Mellon University.
📌 March 2026: I am serving as Area Chair for the ICLR 2026 Delta Workshop.
Older news
📌 November 2025: Two new papers on nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV)! 🎉 One Paper studies convergence guarantees under neural network representations, and the other Paper establishes sharp statistical rates for kernel-based estimators.

Selected Publications and Preprints

  1. (De)-regularized Maximum Mean Discrepancy Gradient Flow
    Zonghao Chen, Aratrika Mustafi, Pierre Glaser, Anna Korba, Arthur Gretton, Bharath K. Sriperumbudur
    JMLR '25 Journal of Machine Learning Research
  2. Towards a Unified Analysis of Neural Networks in Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Regression: Optimization and Generalization
    Zonghao Chen, Atsushi Nitanda, Arthur Gretton, Taiji Suzuki
    Preprint
  3. Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Regression with Observed Covariates
    Zikai Shen*, Zonghao Chen*, Dimitri Meunier, Ingo Steinwart, Arthur Gretton†, Zhu Li†
    Preprint
  4. Stationary MMD Points
    Zonghao Chen, Toni Karvonen, Heishiro Kanagawa, François-Xavier Briol, Chris. J. Oates
    Preprint
  5. Nested Expectations with Kernel Quadrature
    Zonghao Chen, Masha Naslidnyk, François-Xavier Briol
    ICML '25 International Conference on Machine Learning

Awards

  • RIKEN Visiting Fellowship in Machine Learning, RIKEN AIP, Japan

  • Newcastle Visiting Fellowship in Machine Learning, Newcastle University

  • Tsinghua Presidential Scholarship, Tsinghua University

  • Yinghua Scholarship, Tsinghua University

Valar Morghulis! Valar Dohaeris!