Hi! I’m Ivy, a PhD student at MIT CSAIL, where I am fortunate to be co-advised by Professor Phillip Isola and Professor Josh Tenenbaum. Previously, I worked with Professor Guangyu Robert Yang at MIT on autonomous agents for real-time interaction.

My research broadly lies at the intersection of representation learning, agentic systems, and human-centered AI.

I study how agents form and adapt representations of worlds, people, and other agents through interaction, and how those representations shape downstream behavior and generalization.

My current interests include:

• Agents & Interactive Learning: How can agents learn from interaction, adapt to unfamiliar environments, and improve through experience and feedback?
• World Models & Representation Learning: How can machines learn structured and generalizable models of the world? What representations support prediction, abstraction, and counterfactual reasoning?
• Cognitive Science & Human-Centered AI: How does the human mind learn, reason, and adapt? How can these principles help AI systems better understand and adapt to individual people?

I often use games and creative workflows as concrete environments for studying these questions.

I publish under the name “Kaiya Ivy Zhao”, where “Zhao” is my surname and “Kaiya” is my forename. “Ivy” (ai·vee) is the name I usually go by.

Outside of research, I enjoy boba, musicals, classical music, snowboarding and fluffy cats.

Feel free to reach out via email to discuss research or collaborations.