šŸ‘‹ Hello there, I’m Runyu (Cathy)!

Welcome to my website! I am Runyu (Cathy) Zhang, and I am a Postdoc for Engineering Excellence at MIT and I’m working with Prof. Asu Ozdaglar and Prof. Gioele Zardini. I earned my Ph.D. degree at Harvard University, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, under the supervision of Prof. Na Li. Prior to pursuing Ph.D., I earned a B.S. degree in Scientific and Engineering Computing in the Mathematics department at Peking University in 2019.

My research interest lies in learning, control and decision making in multi-agent systems. The high-level objective is to design scalable, efficient and provable learning/control algorithms for multi-agent systems under challenges such as communication constraints, strategic behavior and model uncertainty. My research sits at the intersection of various domains, utilizing tools from reinforcement learning (RL), game theory, control theory and optimization. As an ultimate goal, my research is dedicated to providing both theoretical insights and engineering tools for AI-enabled multi-agent societal systems design and operation. For more detailed research projects and research interests please refer to the research tab and publication tab.

Recent Updates

Sep 2025 Honored to be chosen for the Rising Stars program at the 2025 Northeast Robotics Colloquium (NERC). See you in Cornell! Apr 2025 I won the MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship for Engineering Excellence! Jan 2025 Our paper on distributed control and reinforcement learning for network system Scalable Spectral Representations for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning in Network MDPs is accepted to AISTATS 2025! Feel free to check it out! Sep 2024 Our paper (one of my favorite works!) On the Optimal Control of Network LQR with Spatially-exponential Decaying Structure is accepted to Automatica! Feel free to check it out! Aug 2024 I'm very honored to be selected as rising star in EECS 2024! Jun 2024 Check out our new paper: Equilibrium Selection for Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning! Apr 2024 Our paper Multi-Agent Coverage Control with Transient Behavior Consideration is accepted to L4DC. Feb 2024 Our paper Gradient play in stochastic games: stationary points, convergence, and sample complexity is accepted to Transaction of Automatic Control (TAC)! Jan 2024 Our paper Soft Robust MDPs and Risk-Sensitive MDPs: Equivalence, Policy Gradient, and Sample Complexity is accepted to ICLR.