JOEY T. ZHOU.

A*STAR · SINGAPORE MANAGEMENT UNIVERSITY

Joey
Tianyi Zhou.

Making agentic AI systems more efficient,
trustworthy, and capable.

Head of Applied AI Systems & Agents Chapter, A*STAR
Tenured Associate Professor · SMU

Portrait of Joey Tianyi Zhou
RESEARCH / ENGINEERING / IMPACTSingapore ↗
RESEARCH FOCUSEfficient AITrustworthy AIFoundation Models & Agents

01 / ABOUT

From research
to real-world AI.

I work at the intersection of AI efficiency, robustness, and agentic systems.

As the Head of the Applied AI Systems & Agents Chapter at the Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), I drive the development of the A*STAR Agentic AI platform. I lead the development of AgentOS, an agentic AI platform that supports agentic transformation across Singapore’s research institutions and helps enterprises capture, organize, and preserve institutional knowledge. I also serve as Deputy Director at the Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR). I am also heading AI Engineering & Platform at the National Applied AI Centre of Excellence (CoE), driving the adoption of Agentic AI across companies in Singapore. Concurrently, I am also a tenured Associate Professor of Computer Science at Singapore Management University (SMU). I obtained my Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2015. Prior to my current roles at A*STAR, I worked as a Senior Research Engineer at the Sony US Research Center in San Jose, California.

My research explores how to improve AI efficiency and robustness from a data perspective: building models that use less computation and training data, and remain reliable under perturbations and distribution shifts.

OPEN OPPORTUNITIES

Build the next
generation of AI.

I welcome Ph.D. students, research fellows, scientists, interns, and visiting scholars interested in AI and agentic systems.

Let’s work together ↗

Join the group

Ph.D. scholarships are available through SMU and A*STAR. Strong coding and problem-solving skills are preferred for research positions in agentic AI.

Scholarships & visiting opportunities

Joint Ph.D. visits through ARAP and internships through CIARE or ARIA are welcome. Visiting students, including CSC students from China, may be hosted at SMU or A*STAR.

Students & visiting scholars
  • Ph.D students: Heng Zhao (USTC, BSc; NTU, MSc; 2021 Intake), Yinjie Zhao (NTU, BENG; ACIS scholarship, 2023 Intake), Cheng Shen (UCI, BSc; NYU, MSc; SINGA scholarship, 2023 Intake), Zhiya Tan (SCUT, BA, 2024 Intake)
  • Interns and Visiting Scholars:~30 students/scholars

02 / RESEARCH

Publications & ideas.

Efficient learning. Reliable intelligence.
More capable foundation models and agents.

322 publications

2026

Loop the Loopies!

Zitian Gao, Yilong Chen (disambiguation), Yihao Xiao, Xinyu Yang (disambiguation), Ran Tao 0004, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in Computing Research Repository (CoRR) 2026

2025

A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deployment.

Kun Wang 0056, Guibin Zhang, Zhenhong Zhou, Jiahao Wu (disambiguation), Miao Yu (disambiguation), Shiqian Zhao, Chenlong Yin, Jinhu Fu, Yibo Yan (disambiguation), Hanjun Luo, Liang Lin 0004, Zhihao Xu (disambiguation), Haolang Lu, Xinye Cao, Xinyun Zhou, Weifei Jin, Fanci Meng, Junyuan Mao, Hao Wu (disambiguation), Minghe Wang, Fan Zhang (disambiguation), Junfeng Fang, Chengwei Liu (disambiguation), Yifan Zhang (disambiguation), Qiankun Li 0004, Chongye Guo, Yalan Qin, Yi Ding 0012, Donghai Hong, Jiaming Ji, Xinfeng Li, Yifan Jiang (disambiguation), Dongxia Wang (disambiguation), Yihao Huang 0001, Yufei Guo 0001, Jen-tse Huang 0001, Yanwei Yue, Wenke Huang 0003, Guancheng Wan, Tianlin Li, Lei Bai 0001, Jie Zhang 0073, Qing Guo (disambiguation), Jingyi Wang (disambiguation), Tianlong Chen 0001, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in Computing Research Repository (CoRR) 2025

2025

DD-Ranking: Rethinking the Evaluation of Dataset Distillation.

Zekai Li (disambiguation), Xinhao Zhong, Samir Khaki, Zhiyuan Liang, Yuhao Zhou 0004, Mingjia Shi, Ziqiao Wang (disambiguation), Xuanlei Zhao, Wangbo Zhao, Ziheng Qin, Mengxuan Wu, Pengfei Zhou (disambiguation), Haonan Wang (disambiguation), Junhao Zhang 0001, Jia-Wei Liu, Shaobo Wang 0001, Dai Liu, Linfeng Zhang 0001, Guang Li 0008, Kun Wang 0042, Zheng Zhu (disambiguation), Zhiheng Ma, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in Computing Research Repository (CoRR) 2025

2025

Frontier AI Risk Management Framework in Practice: A Risk Analysis Technical Report.

Xiaoyang Chen (disambiguation), Yunhao Chen (disambiguation), Zeren Chen, Zhiyun Chen (disambiguation), Hanyun Cui, Yawen Duan, Jiaxuan Guo, Qi Guo (disambiguation), Xuhao Hu, Hong Huang (disambiguation), Lige Huang, Chunxiao Li (disambiguation), Juncheng Li (disambiguation), Qihao Lin, Dongrui Liu, Xinmin Liu, Zicheng Liu (disambiguation), Chaochao Lu, Xiaoya Lu, Jingjing Qu, Qibing Ren, Jing Shao 0001, Jingwei Shi, Jingwei Sun (disambiguation), Peng Wang 0095, Weibing Wang, Xu Jia 0012, Lewen Yan, Xiao Yu (disambiguation), Yi Yu 0012, Boxuan Zhang (disambiguation), Jie Zhang 0121, Weichen Zhang (disambiguation), Zhijie Zheng 0001, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in Computing Research Repository (CoRR) 2025

2025

Never Compromise to Vulnerabilities: A Comprehensive Survey on AI Governance.

Yuchu Jiang, Jian Zhao 0006, Yuchen Yuan, Tianle Zhang (disambiguation), Yao Huang (disambiguation), Yanghao Zhang, Yan Wang (disambiguation), Yanshu Li, Xizhong Guo, Yusheng Zhao, Jun Zhang (disambiguation), Zhi Zhang (disambiguation), Xiaojian Lin, Yixiu Zou, Haoxuan Ma, Yuhu Shang, Yuzhi Hu, Keshu Cai, Ruochen Zhang (disambiguation), Boyuan Chen (disambiguation), Yilan Gao, Ziheng Jiao, Yi Qin (disambiguation), Shuangjun Du, Xiao Tong 0003, Zhekun Liu, Yu Chen (disambiguation), Xuankun Rong, Rui Wang (disambiguation), Yejie Zheng, Zhaoxin Fan, Murat Sensoy, Hongyuan Zhang 0001, Pan Zhou (disambiguation), Lei Jin (disambiguation), Hao Zhao (disambiguation), Xu Yang 0021, Jiaojiao Zhao, Jianshu Li, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in Computing Research Repository (CoRR) 2025

2025

Universal Reasoning Model.

Zitian Gao, Lynx Chen, Yihao Xiao, He Xing, Ran Tao 0004, Haoming Luo, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in Computing Research Repository (CoRR) 2025

2023

Calibrating Multimodal Learning.

Huan Ma 0006, Qingyang Zhang (disambiguation), Changqing Zhang 0002, Bingzhe Wu, Huazhu Fu, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR) 2023

2023

Fast Model DeBias with Machine Unlearning.

Ruizhe Chen, Jianfei Yang 0001, Huimin Xiong, Jianhong Bai, Tianxiang Hu, Jin Hao, Yang Feng 0011, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023

2021

Contrastive Clustering.

Yunfan Li 0003, Peng Hu 0002, Zitao Liu 0001, Dezhong Peng, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2021

2020

Zero-Shot Image Dehazing.

Boyun Li, Yuanbiao Gou, Zitao Liu 0001, Hongyuan Zhu 0002, Joey Tianyi Zhou

in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2020

2022

EDCompress: Energy-Aware Model Compression for Dataflows

Zhehui Wang, Tao Luo, Rick Siow Mong Goh, and Joey Tianyi Zhou*

In IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 2022

2021

Locality-Aware Crowd Counting

Joey Tianyi Zhou, Le Zhang, Du Jiawei, Xi Peng, Zhiwen Fang, Zhe Xiao, Hongyuan Zhu

In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 2021

03 / COMMUNITY

Academic service.

Senior/Area Chair

Proposal Expert Panel

  • Expert Panel in the Ministry of Education (MOE) Academic Research Fund.

Membership

  • IEEE Senior Member
  • INNS Member, AICI Section Technical Coordinator
  • EAI Distinguished Member

04 / RECOGNITION

Awards & distinctions.

05 / SUPPORT

Research funding.

  • Digital Trust Centre Innovation Grant (No:DTC-IGC-02): Reassemble Data Before Sharing: Innovative Privacy-Preserved Data-Sharing Solutions for Cloud Services, PI, Jul. 15 2025 - Jul. 14 2026
  • RIE2025 Singapore-Japan Joint Grant (No:R24I6IR133): Breaking Multimodal Correspondence: Crafting Safer and Fairer Multimodal AIGC, PI, Apr. 1 2025 - 31 Mar. 2028
  • AISG 2024 Research Grant (No. AISG3-RP-2024-033): Sequential Deepfake Attribution, PI, 06 Jan. 2025- 05 Jan. 2028
  • National Multimodal LLM Programme (No. AISG-NMLP-2024-003): Privacy^2: Fine-Tuning Encapsulated LLMs to Downstream Tasks Without Peeking on Private Data, Co-PI, 01 Apr. 2025- 31 Mar. 2028
  • A*STAR Central Research Funding: Tiny Machine Learning, PI, 2020-2026

LET’S CONNECT

Good research starts
with a conversation.