Zheng Gong

Email: zhgong (at) ucsd.edu

Zheng Gong is a Ph.D. student in the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His research interest lies in safety-critical systems. Currently, he focuses on finding connections between Control-Lyapunov Functions and Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Analysis. He also has a broad interest in reinforcement learning and robotics.

Before joining UCSD, he received his master’s degree from Duke University, May 2021, where He studied stability for LTI systems with time delays. In June 2019, he completed his bachelor’s degree at the Beijing Institute of Technology.

In his free time, he enjoys playing basketball, video games (CIV 5/6, 2K22, RDR2), and cooking (home-style Chinese food).

Selected Projects

**Control Lyapunov Value Functions:** **A constructive and general method for producing control Lyapunov-like functions that stabilize to an equilibrium (or control invariant set) at a user-defined rate**

**Decomposition (+ Composition) of Value Functions:** **Decomposing coupled dynamic models to generate smaller value functions in each subspace that can be composed to find the backward reachable set (BRS) for a goal or an obstacle**

**Safety in Reinforcement Learning:** **Improving the optimization procedure for reinforcement learning with hard and soft safety constraints using reachability estimation**

Related Papers

Jeong, Hyun Joe, et al. "Parameterized Fast and Safe Tracking (FaSTrack) using Deepreach." Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC), 2024.
Gong, Zheng, Hyun Joe Jeong, and Sylvia Herbert. “Synthesizing Control Lyapunov-Value Functions for High-Dimensional Systems Using System Decomposition and Admissible Control Sets.” IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2024.
Gong, Zheng, Boyang Li, and Sylvia Herbert. “Safe Returning FaSTrack with Robust Control Lyapunov-Value Functions.” IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2024.
He,* Chong, Gong,* Zheng, et al. "Efficient and Guaranteed Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability via Self-Contained Subsystem Decomposition and Admissible Control Sets." IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS) and the American Control Conference (ACC), 2024.
Ganai, Milan, et al. "Iterative Reachability Estimation for Safe Reinforcement Learning." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.
Gong,* Zheng, Zhao,* Muhan Thomas Bewley, and Sylvia Herbert. "Constructing Control Lyapunov-Value Functions using Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Analysis" Control Systems Letters (L-CSS) and the American Control Conference (ACC), 2022.
Gong, Zheng, and Leila Jasmine Bridgeman. "Conic Sector Based Stability Criteria for Time-Delay Systems." IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), IEEE, 2021.

*co-first authors