Hello, I am Flint

Distributed intelligence · Federated RL · Reliable and Trustworthy LLM agents

ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Researcher Distributed Computing Group · Switzerland

Led by Prof. Roger WattenhoferProfessor, ETH Zurich

A*STAR Scientist Centre for Frontier AI Research · Singapore

Led by Prof. Yew-Soon OngFellow, Academy of Engineering Singapore

A*STAR Computing and Information Science Scholar | A*STAR International Fellow

My research develops foundations and methods for distributed intelligence: how agents learn from decentralized experience, align with heterogeneous preferences, and coordinate reliably. I work on federated reinforcement learning, preference alignment, and reliable tool-using LLM agents.

🎓 I received my PhD in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore (NUS), supported by the A*STAR Computing and Information Science Scholarship (ACIS), with supervision from Prof. Wei-Tsang Ooi (NUS), Dr. Cheston Tan (A*STAR) and Prof. Roger Wattenhofer (ETH Zurich).

📢 I welcome research collaborations on a variety of topics, including but not limited to reinforcement learning, federated learning, multi-agent systems, reliable and trustworthy AI agents, as well as practical AI applications. Get in touch →

📰 Recent News

📋 Sep 2026: Accepted Area Chair invitations for ICLR 2027, AISTATS 2027, and IJCNN 2027.

✈️ Aug 2026: Visited Beijing & Hangzhou funded by the CEP project!

📝 Aug 2026: Our two Papers, FedPref: Federated Preference Learning for Structured Radiology Report Extraction and Authority-Preserving Evaluation of Medical Vision-Language Assistants, have been accepted by MICCAI 2026 2nd Emerging LLM/LMM Applications in Medical Imaging (ELAMI)!

✈️ Jun 2026: Attended DiGRA 2026 in Maynooth, Ireland! The slides for my talk on Why do we suffer for fun? can be found here.

📝 Jun 2026: Our team has been awarded two project grants from the Swiss AI Initiative. They give us access to the CSCS Alps compute and related resources from the Swiss National AI Institute!

✈️ May 2026: Attended AAMAS 2026 in Cyprus!

📝 May 2026: Honoured to contribute to the The Science and Humanities Research Olympiad (SHRO 2026) as a research mentor!

📝 Feb 2026: Our Paper, Why Do We Suffer for Fun? Ordeal Pleasure in Souls-like Games, has been accepted by DiGRA 2026!

✈️ Jan 2026: Attended AAAI 2026 in Singapore! Honored to participate in invite-only industry dialogues and talent events hosted by Huawei, Ant Group, and China Telecom (TeleAI) alongside the conference.

📝 Jan 2026: Our Paper, Unveiling and Mitigating Untargeted Poisoning Attacks on Federated Knowledge Graph Embedding, has been accepted by WWW (The ACM Web Conference) 2026!

📝 Dec 2025: Our Paper, Information Fidelity in Tool-Using LLM Agents: A Martingale Analysis of the Model Context Protocol, has been accepted by AAMAS 2026 as an Extended Abstract!

📝 Nov 2025: Our Paper, Provably Reliable Tool-Using AI Agents: Formal Guarantees on Error Accumulation in the Model Context Protocol, has been accepted by AAAI TrustAgent workshop as a Research Long Paper!

📝 Oct 2025: Our Paper, Revisiting the Byzantine Resilience of Federated Reinforcement Learning: A Distillation Perspective, has been accepted by IEEE TrustCom 2025 as a Research Full Paper!

✈️ Jul 2025: Attended IJCNN 2025 in Rome! The slides for my talk on our position on Sequential Privacy can be found here.

✈️ Jul 2025: Visited beautiful Malta for DiGRA 2025! The slides for my 30-mins talk on analyzing Black Myth: Wukong as a cultural mediator can be found here. If you are interested in cultural representation study through interactive media such as video games, feel free to drop me a message!

🎉 Jun 2025: I relocated to Zurich, Switzerland for conducting postdoc research at ETH Zurich!

✈️ May 2025: Wrapped up an incredible week at AAMAS 2025 in Detroit! Honored that our paper FedRLHF: A Convergence-Guaranteed Federated Framework for Privacy-Preserving and Personalized RLHF was selected as one of the premier papers at the conference, and received an invitation for fast-track submission to JAAMAS! Slides for FedRLHF can be found here.

📝 Apr 2025: Our Position Paper on [Sequential Privacy] Rethinking Privacy in RL for Sequential Decision-making in the Age of LLMs has been accepted by IJCNN 2025 position paper track. It has been selected and featured by AIWorld.eu as one of the top 10 Notable AI Research Papers of the week!

📝 Apr 2025: Our Paper, Diversifying Robot Locomotion Behaviors with Extrinsic Behavioral Curiosity, has been accepted by ICML 2025!

📝 Mar 2025: Our Paper, Generative Quality Diversity Imitation Learning for Robot Skill Acquisition, has been accepted by ICLR 2025 Workshop on Generative Models for Robot Learning!

🎉 Mar 2025: I joined A*STAR's Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR) as a Scientist!

🎓 Mar 2025: My PhD was conferred!

📝 Feb 2025: Our Paper, From Myth to Market: Lessons from Black Myth: Wukong's Success, has been accepted by DiGRA 2025!

📝 Dec 2024: Checkout our AAMAS-25 paper FedRLHF (Federated RLHF), a framework that balances the global performance and personalization in LLMs fine-tuning, while preserving user privacy!

🏆 May 2024: I've been awarded the prestigious A*STAR International Fellowship!

📜 Grants

PI, Federated and Personalized AI for Multi-Centre Chronic Skin Disease Management, funded by the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality through its Shanghai Sci-tech Co-research Program (上海伙伴科研计划); RMB 400,000, 2026--2028
Scientific Lead / Co-PI, “FrictionBench”, funded by Swiss AI Initiative Compute Grant, 16,000 GH200 GPU-hours, 2026
Scientific Lead / Co-PI, “DISCO-LakeBench”, funded by Swiss AI Initiative Compute Grant, 16,000 GH200 GPU-hours, 2026

🏛️ Institutional Service

A*STAR STAR Ambassador (2026-2027)
A*STAR Scholars’ Representative to its Global Network Initiative (ETH Zurich, AY2025-2026)
NUS MComp Admissions Committee Member: Jan 2022, Aug 2022, Jan 2023 intakes

🏆 Honors and Awards

Young International Talent, China Exchange Program for Young International Talents (CEP, 国际青年人才来华交流项目), funded by China International Talent Exchange Foundation; 2026
Top Reviewer Award, NeurIPS 2025
A*STAR International Fellowship (2024)
AAMAS Student Scholarship (2024)
Research Achievement Award | School of Computing, NUS (AY2021-2022)
A*STAR Computing and Information Science Scholarship (2020 - 2024)
AWS Machine Learning Scholarship | Udacity (May 2020)
Dean's List (Top 5%) | College of Engineering, NTU (AY2017 - AY2018)
Dean's List (Top 5%) | College of Engineering, NTU (AY2016 - AY2017)
NTU President Research Scholar (Sep. 2017)
NTU Science and Engineering Undergraduate Scholarship (2015 - 2019)
SM2 Scholarship | Ministry of Education, Singapore (2014 - 2015)
National Third Prize | The 30th Chinese Physics Olympiad (Sep 2013)

💼 Academic Service

Area Chair

ICLR2027
AISTATS2027
IEEE ICASSP2026
IEEE/INNS IJCNN2025, 2026, 2027

Session Chair

AAAI: 2026
AAMAS: 2025
ALA: 2024

Committee Member

ICLR: 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027 (Area Chair)
AISTATS: 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027 (Area Chair)
IEEE ICASSP: 2026 (Area Chair)
IEEE/INNS IJCNN: 2025, 2026, 2027 (Area Chair); 2026 (Position Paper Track Reviewer)
AAMAS: 2023, 2025, 2026
ALA: 2024, 2025, 2026
ACM PODC: 2026
ICML: 2026 (Position Paper Track)
DiGRA: 2026 (Serious Games and Education Track)
IJCAI: 2024
IEEE CAI: 2024
NeurIPS: 2023, 2025
IEEE ICRA: 2022, 2023, 2026
IEEE IROS: 2021, 2022, 2023