About Me

Hi, I’m Junkai Luo! I am an M.Sc. student in Computational Science and Engineering at McMaster University, affiliated with the DeGroote School of Business and supervised by Dr. Nooshin Salari and Dr. Lingling Shi. I received my bachelor’s degree in Cyberspace Security from Sichuan University.

My research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and operations research. I am particularly interested in combining reinforcement learning and optimization to support decision-making under uncertainty, with applications in resource allocation and operations management. My previous research has explored natural language processing and reinforcement learning.

Email · Google Scholar · GitHub

Research Interests

Reinforcement learning: learning effective policies for sequential decision-making, including deep reinforcement learning.
Data-driven optimization: integrating predictive models with optimization to improve decisions under uncertainty.

Publications

Online Finetuning Decision Transformers with Pure RL Gradients

Junkai Luo, Yinglun Zhu (**NeurIPS2026**)

Can Large Language Models Understand Internet Buzzwords Through User-Generated Content

Chen Huang, Junkai Luo, Xinzuo Wang, Wenqiang Lei, Jiancheng Lv (**ACL2025**)

Education

McMaster University
M.Sc. in Computational Science and Engineering · 2026–present
DeGroote School of Business

Sichuan University
Bachelor’s degree in Cyberspace Security · 2022-2026

Honours and Awards

Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Sichuan Province (Top 3% in the province) — 2026
“Top 100 Students of the Year”, Sichuan University (Top 0.3% in the university) — 2026
BYD Scholarship, BYD AUTO INDUSTRY CO., LTD. (1 out of 180) — 2025
National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China (Top 0.2% in China) — 2024

Academic Service

Teaching Assistant, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University — 2DA3: Decision Making with Analytics.
Seminar Committee Member, McMaster Computational Science and Engineering — helping organize research talks for the CSE community.

Get in Touch

I’m happy to connect with researchers and students interested in reinforcement learning, optimization, and their applications. Feel free to reach out at luo109@mcmaster.ca.