Zangir Iklassov successfully defends his PhD at MBZUAI

Zangir studied how neural networks and reinforcement learning can accelerate solutions to combinatorial problems such as routing, resource allocation, and planning. He presented the following projects:

• A new training approach for production planning in which problem complexity increases dynamically, improving model training
• An RL framework for routing problems with stochastic travel times on a graph
• A new self-directed search strategy that uses large language models to solve combinatorial problems efficiently

This work was published at IJCAI23, ACML23, IEEE Access, and NeurIPS24.

MBZUAI is the world's first university dedicated to artificial intelligence. It opened in Abu Dhabi in 2019 and ranks among the top 20 in AI/ML. Zangir became the third PhD candidate in MBZUAI's history to successfully defend his dissertation!

Applications recently opened for MBZUAI Master's and PhD programs starting in fall 2025. The university offers five areas: ML, CV, NLP, CS, and Robotics. The first application-round deadline is January 15, 2025.