I am currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in AI and Applications of AI in the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. Before joining Sheffield, I was a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. I spent about 2.5 years as a Postdoctoral Researcher in reinforcement learning in the Whiteson Research Lab at the University of Oxford, advised by Shimon Whiteson. I was also a Non-Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at St Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford. I received my doctorate from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University in 2018, after working for five years at the Intelligent Robot Learning Lab with my advisor Matthew E. Taylor. Before that, I worked as a front-end web developer in Tencent after receiving my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China in 2012.

My research focuses mainly on (deep) reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, interactive machine learning, and curriculum learning. My long-term research goal is to develop intelligent autonomous agents that can accomplish sequential decision-making tasks in complex uncertain and dynamic real-world environments, with or without humans in the loop. During my postdoc, I worked mainly on developing new deep multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms for discrete and continuous cooperative multi-agent tasks. My PhD research focuses on interactive machine learning and curriculum learning, where we study how non-expert humans want to teach the agent to solve new complex sequential decision making tasks and how to incorporate these insights into the development of new machine learning algorithms.

I am currently hiring a PhD student to work on reinforcement learning from human feedback. Feel free to email me if you are interested. Please include your CV and academic transcripts in the email. If you are interested in doing a postdoc with me, check out this opportunity.

Recent News

• July 2025: I served as the Workshop/Tutorial Co-Chair for the Distributed AI (DAI) Conference 2025.

• May 2025: Our paper Evaluating the Evaluation of Diversity in Commonsense Generation has been accepted for publication in ACL 2025.

• SEP 2024: Our paper Centralised Rehearsal of Decentralised Cooperation: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for the Scalable Coordination of Residential Energy Flexibility has been accepted for publication in Applied Energy.

• SEP 2024: Our paper Improving Diversity of Commonsense Generation by Large Language Models via In-Context Learning got accepted at the Findings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.

• AUG 2024: Our paper Accelerating Laboratory Automation Through Robot Skill Learning for Sample Scraping got accepted at IEEE CASE 2024 and was selected as a finalist for the Best Healthcare Automation Paper Award.

• AUG 2024: Our paper Contextual Transformers for Goal-Oriented Reinforcement Learning got accepted at the SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

• FEB 2024: I served as the Co-Chair for the Competition Track of IJCAI 2024.

• OCT 2023: I gave an invited talk at the Game Theory and Machine Learning Workshop at London School of Economics.

• OCT 2023: I served as a Panellist in the RL-CONFROM Workshop at IROS 2023.

• AUG 2023: Our paper Deep Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control of Material Thickness got accepted at the SGAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

• JUN 2023: I received the Grace Hopper Celebration 2023 Faculty Scholarship.

• MAR 2023: Our paper Curriculum Learning for Relative Overgeneralization was accepted at the Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALA) Workshop at AAMAS 2023. It is Lin’s first workshop paper and the result of his hard work on his final year undergraduate project.

• AUG 2022: Our paper Dependable Learning-Enabled Multiagent Systems has been accepted for publication in AI Communications.

• JUL 2022: I gave a lecture on Introduction to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning at the CIFAR 2022 Deep Learning + Reinforcement Learning (DLRL) Summer School.

• MAY 2022: I gave an invited talk on Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning at the Adaptive and Learning Agents (ALA) Workshop at AAMAS 2022.