Hello, I’m

Weizhi Du.

I build search ranking models
and agents that verify their work.

Computer Science Undergraduate at WashU.

Previously

Machine Learning Engineer Intern
TikTok · Search & Recommendation

Research Science Intern
Meituan · LLMs & post-training

Notes on search, self-play, and reliable agents learn what mattersquery relevance scores strategy through play self-play check before you trustpropose validationgate keep revise + verify

Industry

Search & AI agents, at Silicon Valley scale.

May 2026 - Aug. 2026 San Jose, CA

TikTok

Machine Learning Engineer Intern, TikTok Search

fine ranking
+0.18 pp stay-time AUC
44% fewer sparse features

Developed session representation learning, sparse architecture search, and feature attribution for search ranking across RoW, EU, and US markets.

Jun. 2025 - Aug. 2025Beijing, China

Meituan

Research Science Intern · Search & Content Intelligence

post-training

LLM agents · SFT + DPO

+24%dialogue accuracy
65%fewer fallbacks

Combined SFT on 30K examples and targeted DPO for a search agent with intent routing, specialist models, tools, and retrieval.

49.6% → 72.3% retrieval coverage

Research

Reliable AI, with evidence.

WashU Medicine Research Assistant · Advisor: Dr. Jin Zhang

FDG-PET segmentation

Safety-aware agents

Bounded actions, validation-gated improvement, and auditable provenance.

Unrestricted agent0.613
MONAI SegResNet0.807
Safety-aware agent0.813

Test-set Dice

Multimodal RAG

Clinical reasoning

Query reformulation, curated retrieval, and citation-grounded aggregation.

98.0%

accuracy on
300 ACR TXIT questions

94% → 98%GPT-5 accuracy
8.2×higher odds of better physician-rated accuracy

Publications & research outputs

01

Accepted posterRRS · 2026

A Safety-Aware Agentic AI System for Refining FDG-PET Auto-Contouring in Locally Advanced Cervical Cancer

Weizhi Du, Tingjun Liu, En Wei, Andrew Willett, Matthew Inkman, Xucheng Wang, Thomas Mazur, Julie K. Schwarz, Mengxin Yu, and Jin Zhang.

72nd Annual Meeting of the Radiation Research Society, 2026.

Link ↗
02

Forthcoming chapterCRC Press

Generative AI and Large Language Models

Weizhi Du, Andrew Willett, Matthew Inkman, Tingjun Liu, Michael R. Waters, and Jin Zhang.

Chapter 3 in Generative AI Models and Reinforcement Learning in Radiotherapy Treatment Planning. CRC Press, forthcoming.

Link ↗
03

Under reviewJAMA Oncology · 2026

Evaluation of Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Radiation Oncology

Tingjun Liu, Matthew Inkman, Andrew Willett, Xucheng Wang, Weizhi Du, Jessika A. Contreras, Stephanie Markovina, Julian C. Hong, Michael R. Waters, and Jin Zhang.

Manuscript under review at JAMA Oncology, 2026.

Link ↗
04

Accepted posterRRS · 2026

Self-Evolving Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation Enables High-Accuracy and Confidence-Aware Radiation Oncology Reasoning

Tingjun Liu, Xucheng Wang, Matthew Inkman, Andrew Willett, Weizhi Du, Julian C. Hong, Michael R. Waters, and Jin Zhang.

72nd Annual Meeting of the Radiation Research Society, 2026.

Link ↗

SELECTED PROJECTS

Ideas to working systems.

Concept sketch of an agent with partial knowledge selectively acquiring hidden capabilities, retaining them across arriving tasks, and weighing budget, deadlines, and agent availability

Agents with partial knowledge

Planner-guided agents acquire hidden capabilities and reuse them across budget-constrained tasks.

61% feweragent contacts vs. random querying
62% feweraction schemas disclosed vs. Reveal-All
Method & findings

Symbolic diagnosis identifies missing capabilities, and an LLM ranks providers from public profiles. Selective disclosure expands a partial action model; persistent memory reuses discoveries across tasks. Across six methods and 576 validated trials, task-conditioned acquisition reduced agent contacts by 61% versus random querying and action-schema disclosure by 62% versus Reveal-All.

Read project report ↗
Sketch of a Gomoku board, self-play games, a learned network, and a pruned search tree

Gomoku through self-play

AlphaZero-style self-play with threat-aware MCTS pruning.

60%peak win rate vs. pure MCTS
7 hourscompleted 8×8 connect-5 training
Method & findings

An AlphaZero-style policy–value network guides self-play and MCTS. Local candidate restriction narrows the search, while threat-aware exceptions preserve immediate winning and blocking moves. The pruned system completed 8×8 connect-5 training in 7 hours versus an unfinished 48-hour unrestricted run, achieving a 60% peak win rate against pure MCTS.

Read project report ↗
Illustration of a language query selecting the mug left of a book through region proposals, matching, and spatial reasoning

Training-free visual grounding

YOLOv8n + OpenCLIP + spatial reasoning. No task-specific training.

0.15 Btotal model parameters
62.8%Acc@0.5 on RefCOCO-M
Method & findings

YOLOv8n region proposals, OpenCLIP crop–text scoring, and explicit spatial reasoning form a training-free, 0.15B-parameter system with interpretable explanations. Ablations improved RefCOCO-M Acc@0.5 from 40.6% with CLIP alone to 62.8% with the full pipeline, achieving 0.614 mIoU across 5,598 validation queries.

Read project report ↗

TEACHING AT WASHU

Making hard ideas click.

CSE 24076 semesters

Data Structures
& Algorithms

Head TA · 3 semesters
Previously TA, Recitation & Grading Lead

30+TAs coordinated
200+students / semester
CSE 2407

Data Structures & Algorithms

Head TA · 3 of 6 semesters

CSE 4207

Cloud Computing

Head TA · 1 semester

CSE 5104

Data Mining

TA · 2 semesters

ESE 4270

Financial Mathematics

TA · 1 semester

ESE 4150

Optimization

TA · 1 semester

ESE 4170

Introduction to Machine Learning

TA · 1 semester

ESE 3260

Probability & Statistics for Engineering

TA · 1 semester

CSE 247R

Data Structures & Algorithms Seminar

TA · 2 semesters

Exam hosting (opens a new tab)

The vibe

Still a person after the metrics.

I enjoy creative writing, making music, cooking, and taking the long way through deserts with a camera. Usually with Yorushika in the background and my cat nearby.

Your Year with ChatGPT: a pixel-art desk with code, a GPU, coffee, a notebook, and a cat
“Your Year with ChatGPT,” 2025.

Contact

Say hi.

Ping me about anything you're excited about. Always happy to meet and build!

Industry