Zhepei “Bruce” Wei (魏哲培)
 |
Ph.D. Student Email: zhepei.wei [AT] virginia [DOT] edu |
About me
Hello! My name is Zhepei (/dʒɜ:peɪ/) Wei, and I also go by Bruce. I'm a CS PhD student at the University of Virginia, advised by Prof. Yu Meng. Prior to this, I received my B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Jilin University in 2019 and 2022. During the research journey, I was fortunate to have been advised by Prof. Hongning Wang and Prof. Yi Chang, and to have worked as a research intern at Amazon, mentored by Dr. Lihong Li.
I am also a recipient of the UVA Copenhaver Charitable Trust Bicentennial Fellowship and the John A. Stankovic Outstanding Graduate Research Award.
For more information, please check my CV.
What's New
[05/2025] Thrilled to be selected as a top reviewer at ICML 2025!
[05/2025] Moved to Redmond and started my internship at Meta!
[05/2025] Check out our latest work on LLM-based web agents “WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning”!
[05/2025] Our paper "AdaDecode: Accelerating LLM Decoding with Adaptive Layer Parallelism" is accepted at ICML 2025.
[01/2025] Our paper "InstructRAG: Instructing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Self-Synthesized Rationales" is accepted at ICLR 2025.
[01/2025] Moved to Seattle and started my internship at Amazon!
[09/2024] Thrilled to receive the Copenhaver Charitable Trust Bicentennial Fellowship ($12,000)!
[07/2024] Thrilled to be accepted to OpenAI’s Researcher Access Program ($5,000 API credits)!
[06/2024] Check out our latest work on explicit denoising for RAG “InstructRAG: Instructing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Self-Synthesized Rationales”!
[05/2024] Thrilled to be nominated for the Google PhD Fellowship (up to 3 nominees per university)
[05/2024] Thrilled to receive the John A. Stankovic Outstanding Graduate Research Award (awarded to 1~3 CS PhD students each year)!
[01/2024] Our paper "Incentivized Truthful Communication for Federated Bandits" is accepted at ICLR 2024.
[09/2023] Our paper "Incentivized Communication for Federated Bandits" is accepted at NeurIPS 2023.
[08/2022] Relocated to the lovely Charlottesville and began my PhD journey at UVA!
Research Interests
My current research interests focus on the learning foundation of large language models (LLMs) and their applications in solving practical problems (e.g., knowledge reasoning, question answering). My recent work contributes to efficient and trustworthy language generation and reasoning with LLMs, including:
Efficient LLM inference (e.g., AdaDecode [Wei et al., ICML 2025] )
LLM-based agentic decision-making (e.g, WebAgent-R1 [Wei et al., 2025])
Retrieval-augmented generation (e.g., InstructRAG [Wei et al., ICLR 2025])
I also worked on reinforcement learning (RL) theory, where I introduced the incentivization problem in multi-agent decision-making and proposed efficient communication algorithms with rigorous mathematical guarantees (e.g., Inc-FedUCB [Wei et al., NeurIPS 2023], Truth-FedBan [Wei et al., ICLR 2024]).
Selected Awards & Honors
2024. Copenhaver Charitable Trust Bicentennial Fellowship, University of Virginia.
2024. John A. Stankovic Graduate Research Award, University of Virginia.
2023. NeurIPS Scholar Award, NeurIPS Foundation.
2022. Computer Science Scholar Fellowship, University of Virginia.