His research interest is in machine learning, mainly on reinforcement learning and derivative-free optimization for learning. He has published more than 40 papers in Artificial Intelligence, TPAMI, TKDE, NeurIPS, IJCAI, AAAI, KDD, etc. He has been granted several conference best paper awards including IDEAL'16, GECCO'11 (theory track), PAKDD'08, etc. He was in the Champion Team of 2018 OpenAI RetroContest, and the Grand Champion Team of PAKDD 2006 Data Mining Competition. He received CCF-IEEE Early Career Award in 2020, was recognized as one of the “AI’s 10 to Watch” by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2018, and received the PAKDD Early Career Award in 2018. He was invited to give an Early Career Spotlight Talk in IJCAI'18. He has served as an Area Chair of NeurIPS, IJCAI, AAAI, ACML for multiple years. He was a Publicity Co-chair of IJCAI'16/17 and IEEE ICDM'16; a Workshop Co-chair of ACML'16 and PRICAI’18. He co-founded the International Conference on Distributed Artificial Intelligence, and the Asian Workshop on Reinforcement Learning.