Guangtao Zheng

I am an AI Research Scientist at Accenture. I obtained my PhD degree in Computer Science at University of Virginia advised by Prof. Aidong Zhang. Before joining UVA, I earned my Master’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China and my Bachelor’s degree from Sun Yat-sen University.

My research is on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. My main research theme is on AI alignment and safety from the perspective of detecting and mitigating spurious correlations, with topics covering:

• Shortcut learning in image/text classification
• Superficial learning in multimodal models
• Reward hacking in reinforcement learning
• Benchmarking superficial learning in AI models
• Robust reasoning and planning in agentic systems

In addition to solving fundamental machine learning problems, I am also passionate about application-driven machine learning, leveraging techniques such as self-supervised learning and generative modeling to accelerate knowledge discovery in genomics.