TikTok
Machine Learning Engineer Intern, TikTok Search
Developed session representation learning, sparse architecture search, and feature attribution for search ranking across RoW, EU, and US markets.
Hello, I’m
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
Industry
Machine Learning Engineer Intern, TikTok Search
Developed session representation learning, sparse architecture search, and feature attribution for search ranking across RoW, EU, and US markets.
Research Science Intern · Search & Content Intelligence
LLM agents · SFT + DPO
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
WashU Medicine Research Assistant · Advisor: Dr. Jin Zhang
Accepted posterRRS · 2026
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 ↗Forthcoming chapterCRC Press
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 ↗Under reviewJAMA Oncology · 2026
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 ↗Accepted posterRRS · 2026
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
Planner-guided agents acquire hidden capabilities and reuse them across budget-constrained tasks.
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 ↗
AlphaZero-style self-play with threat-aware MCTS pruning.
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 ↗
YOLOv8n + OpenCLIP + spatial reasoning. No task-specific training.
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
Head TA · 3 semesters
Previously TA, Recitation & Grading Lead
Head TA · 3 of 6 semesters
Head TA · 1 semester
TA · 2 semesters
TA · 1 semester
TA · 1 semester
TA · 1 semester
TA · 1 semester
TA · 2 semesters
The vibe
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.

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