Welcome

We have multiple positions available at the levels of PhD students (admission in January/September 2027), Postdoctoral Fellows and Research Assistant at Lingnan University (Hong Kong SAR). Please check Join Us for more details.

Research Group

I’m leading the Learning and Optimisation in Games (LOG) Group under the Nature Inspired Computation and Applications Laboratory (NICAL). LOG Group works closely with Tencent’s LightSpeed Studios and MOZA. Our alumni have received offers from major tech and gaming giants, including ByteDance, miHoYo, Huawei, MOZA, and Tencent’s TiMi Studio Group and Morefun Studios.

LOG课题组与腾讯光子工作室群及魔爪（MOZA）紧密合作。毕业生屡获知名科技与游戏企业 offer，包括字节跳动、米哈游、华为、魔爪，以及腾讯天美和魔方工作室群。

Research Interests

• AI in/for Games
  • Procedural Content Generation (PCG): Leveraging deep learning (DL), reinforcement learning (RL), evolutionary computation (EC), and large language models (LLMs) to generate novel, diverse, and playable game levels, rules, and scenarios – increasingly through generative world models that simulate entire game environments.
  • AI for Game-Playing: Designing autonomous agents (EC- and RL-based, and more recently LLM-driven) for general game playing (GGP), general video game playing (GVGP), and autonomous racing.
  • AI in Education & Educational Games: Turning digital games into interactive, adaptive tutors, including LLM-powered agents, to improve learning efficiency and reshape CS/AI education.
• Fair Machine Learning & AI Ethics
  • Algorithmic Fairness & Robustness: Building trustworthy AI frameworks that ensure fair decisions under data imbalance, concept drift, and environmental uncertainty, in both stationary and non-stationary settings.
  • Ethical Concerns in LLMs: Studying hidden biases, deception, and emergent social behavior when LLM agents interact in multiplayer settings such as Werewolf (Mafia).
• Learn to Optimise under Uncertainty
  • Algorithm Portfolios & MetaBBO: Automating the configuration and selection of black-box optimizers (Meta-Black-Box Optimization), including LLM-assisted algorithm design, to reduce manual engineering effort.
  • Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimisation: Enabling evolutionary learning algorithms to track changing environments while balancing conflicting objectives, with an emphasis on generalization and robustness.
• Smart Logistics
  • Vehicle Routing & Material Handling: Developing neural solvers for vehicle routing (VRP) variants and dynamic scheduling in real-world manufacturing and smart-factory logistics.
  • Autonomous Driving: Using generative methods and world models to generate controllable, multimodal driving scenarios and motion patterns that rigorously stress-test autonomous driving systems (ADSs) and virtual racing simulators.

For more about our research, please check our Group website or my publications on Google Scholar. My Erdös Number is 4, through Sylvie Ruette, Bernard Host and Vitaly Bergelson.

Grants

Principal Investigator (PI) for external projects totaling over 10M RMB, funded by major national/provincial agencies (e.g., MOST, NSFC) and industry leaders including Tencent, Huawei and Moza.

作为项目负责人，累计主持外部科研项目总经费超过1千万元人民币，获批科技部重点研发计划、国家自然科学基金委等国家与省部级项目，以及腾讯、华为、魔爪等行业领军企业的经费资助。

National-level grants：

• Theory and Methods for Building Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Based on Evolutionary Computation, Natural Science Foundation of China - Research Fund for International Scientists, 2023-2025, Participant
• Online Procedural Content Generation via Multi-objective Optimisation and Learning, National Key Research and Development Program, 2023-2025, PI
• Resampling Strategies in Noisy Evolutionary Optimization, Natural Science Foundation of China - Young Research Scheme, 2020-2022, PI

Professional Experience

• Present, Associate Professor
  Head of Learning and Optimisation in Games (LOG) Group
  School of Data Science (SDS), Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR, China
• 2024-2027, Honorary Professor
  School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
• 2021-2024, Tenure-Track Assistant Professor
  Head of Learning and Optimisation in Games (LOG) Group
  Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China
• 2018-2021, Research Assistant Professor/Research Associate Professor
  Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China
• 2017-2018, Postdoc
  Collaborated PI: Simon Lucas (Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Head of Game AI Research Group, Head of School)
  School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), UK
• 2016-2017, Postdoc
  Collaborated PI: Simon Lucas (Professor, Head of School)
  School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essec (UoE), UK

Education

• 2016, Ph.D in Computer Science
  Portfolio methods in uncertain contexts (in English)
  Team TAO, INRIA Saclay-CNRS-LRI, Université Paris-Saclay, Paris Saclay, France
  Supervisors: Olivier Teytaud (INRIA Saclay / Google Brain / Meta AI) and Marc Schoenauer (Deputy Research Director at INRIA, in charge of AI, INRIA Saclay)
  Examined by Bruno Bouzy, Philippe Dague, Marcus Gallagher, Simon Lucas, Petr Pošík and Günter Rudolph.
• 2013, Master’s degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Reconstruction of molecules with new functions using artificial simulations by directed evolution (in French)
  BIOcomputing and Structure (BIOS) Research Group, École Polytechnique & Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France
  Supervisors: Jérôme Azé, Thomas Simonson and Thomas Gaillard
• 2012, Engineer’s degree in Computer Science (Network, Artificial Intelligence)
  Polytech’Paris-Sud, Orsay, France
• 2010, Bachelor’s degree in Optical & Electronic Information
  School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China

Invited Talks (selected list)

• Keynote at the 2025 Advances in Computer Games Conference (ACG 2025) (online), 23 October 2025.
• Invited talk at Leiden University (Maastricht, Netherlands), 27 February 2025.
• Keynote at the 2024 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (Yokohama, Japan), 4 July 2024.
• Invited talk at University of Malta (Malta), 23 November 2023.
• Invited lecture at University of Málaga (online), 27 May 2022.
• Invited talk at ByteDance (Shenzhen, China), 15 April 2021.
• Invited lecture at 2020 IEEE Biennial Congress of Argentina (online), 4 December 2020.
• Invited talk at French Platform on Artificial Intelligence (online), 1 July 2020.
• Invited talk at Tencent (Shenzhen, China), 27 July 2018.
• Invited talk at Google DeepMind (London, UK), 7 March 2018.
• Invited talk at Maastricht University (Maastricht, Netherlands), November 2017.