Bio

I am currently an associate professor with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University. I received my B.S. in Automotive Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2007 and my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2012, under the guidance of Dr. Panos Papalambros.

Research Interests

I'm interested in open questions related to game theory, optimization, and AI for science that are technically within my reach. Current projects include:

• 2p0s differential games with incomplete information and temporal logic specifications (e.g., for football strategic planning)
• Learning PDEs from experimental observations (e.g., for modeling materials structure-property mapping)
• GenAI robust watermarking and attribution

Selected Publications

• Ghimire, M., Zhang, L., Xu, Z., & Ren, Y. (2025). A Scalable Solver for 2p0s Differential Games with One-Sided Payoff Information and Continuous Actions, States, and Time. arXiv:2502.00560 (Best paper award at AAAI Multiagent AI in Real World Workshop 2025)

• Ghimire, M., Zhang, L., Xu, Z., & Ren, Y. (2024). State-constrained zero-sum differential games with one-sided information. ICML 2024. arXiv:2403.02741


• Zhang, L., Ghimire, M., Zhang, W., Xu, Z., & Ren, Y. (2024). Value Approximation for Two-Player General-Sum Differential Games With State Constraints. IEEE Transactions on Robotics. arXiv:2311.16520

• Nie, G., Kim, C., Yang, Y., & Ren, Y. (2023). Attributing Image Generative Models using Latent Fingerprints. ICML 2023. arXiv:2304.09752

• Cheng, S., Yang, J., & Ren, Y. (2022). Data-driven learning of 3-point correlation functions as microstructure representations. Acta Materialia. arXiv:2109.02255

• Kim, C., Ren, Y., & Yang, Y. (2021). Decentralized Attribution of Generative Models. ICLR 2021. arXiv:2010.13974

Current Students

• Mukesh Ghimire (PhD, co-advised by Dr. Zhe Xu) – Differential games
• Sheng Cheng (PhD, co-advised by Dr. Yezhou Yang) – AI for science
• Guangyu Nie (PhD) – AI for science

Past Students

• Lei Zhang (PhD) – Postdoc at Purdue
• Ruijin Cang (PhD) – Google
• Houpu Yao (PhD) – Google
• Pei-En Chen (PhD, co-advised by Dr. Yang Jiao)
• Nathan Cahill (PhD, co-advised by Dr. Tom Sugar)
• Yongbaek Cho (MS)
• Wenlong Shi (MS) – PhD student at ASU
• Yi Chen (MS) – Aptiv
• Steven Elliott (MS) – Northrop Grumman
• Aditya Vipradas (MS)
• Adithya Venugopal (MS)
• Tanner Merry (BS) – US Navy
• John Daly (BS) – NASA
• Malcolm Regan (BS) –
• Thurston Sexton (BS/MS) – NIST
• Paul Stobinske (BS/MS) – Northrop Grumman
• Travis Zhang (HS) – Cornell CS BS/MS
• Richard Cheng (HS) – U. Waterloo Math BS