Lesley (Yajie) Zhou

leszhou (at) umd (dot) edu
GitHub
LinkedIn
Google Scholar

---

About Me

I am currently a PhD student at UMD College Park, advised by Prof. Alan (Zaoxing) Liu . We are working on system, networking, and security problems with exciting data-driven approaches.

I am also honored to be advised by Prof. Junchen Jiang from University of Chicago and Dr. Francis Yan from Microsoft Research (MSR) prior to the PhD program. We proposed Genet for improving the performance and generalization of RL-based networking systems.

I received my M.S. degree from KAIST, majoring in Electrical Engineering. I received my B.S. degree from Xidian University in China, majoring in Computer Science.

---

Publications

Enhancing Network Management Using Code Generated by Large Language Models
Sathiya Kumaran Mani, Yajie Zhou, Kevin Hsieh, Santiago Segarra, Ranveer Chandra, Srikanth Kandula
To appear in HotNets 2023.

Towards Interactive Simulacra of Internet Investigation by Human Researchers
Yajie Zhou*, Nengneng Yu*, Zaoxing Liu (*co-first author)
To appear in HotNets 2023.

Genet: Automatic Curriculum Generation for Learning Adaptation in Networking
Zhengxu Xia*, Yajie Zhou*, Francis Y. Yan, Junchen Jiang (*co-first author)
ACM SIGCOMM August 2022.
Link to talk: SIGCOMM-Genet

Summary: We proposed Genet, a novel training framework that enhances the performance and generalization of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in networking and systems. Genet builds on curriculum learning with judicious use of rule-based baselines. It substantially improves the performance and generalization of simulation-trained RL algorithms under unseen workloads and in real environments.

---

Work Experience

Microsoft Research

Research Intern in Networking Research Group May 2023 - Aug. 2023
Redmond, WA

• Revolutionizing Network Management with Large Language Models (LLMs)
• Explore ML-based Approach for Network Micro-segmentation

---

Awards

SIGCOMM Travel Grant, 2022
N2Women Young Researcher Fellowship, 2022

---

Contact

Feel free to send me an email at leszhou (at) umd (dot) edu.