Tencent has further expanded its AI talent network. On January 30, 2026, Pang Tianyu, a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University and former senior research scientist at Sea AI Lab in Singapore, announced that he will officially join Tencent on February 4. He will serve as the Chief Research Scientist of the Tongyi Large Model team at Tencent and also lead the multi-modal reinforcement learning technology.

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Biography: From a Tsinghua Star to a Top Scientist

Pang Tianyu is a renowned young scholar in the field of machine learning, with an extremely valuable resume:

Academic Background: Born in 1995, he was admitted to Tsinghua University in high school. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Tsinghua University Basic Science Program in 2017 and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University in 2022, under the supervision of Professor Zhu Jun.

Research Achievements: He has long focused on the robustness of machine learning and deep learning, publishing over 70 papers at top international AI conferences such as ICML and NeurIPS, with more than 15,000 citations in total.

Industry Honors: He has received several prestigious awards, including the Microsoft Scholars Fellowship, Baidu Scholarship, NVIDIA Academic Pioneer Award, and CAAI Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Career Path: After obtaining his doctorate, he worked at Sea AI Lab in Singapore, focusing on trustworthy machine learning and generative models.

Responsibilities: Focusing on Multi-Modal and Reinforcement Learning

After joining the Tongyi team, Pang Tianyu will mainly be responsible for research on reinforcement learning in multi-modal models:

R&D Focus: In the initial phase, he will focus on breakthroughs in generation model technology.

Team Structure: The Exploration Center, led by him, will primarily be responsible for exploring cutting-edge reinforcement learning algorithms.

Tencent Tongyi Large Model's "Talent Puzzle"

This appointment is part of Tencent's recent series of "talent strengthening" initiatives:

Talent Hub: In December 2025, Yao Shunyu, a former researcher at OpenAI, joined Tencent as Chief AI Scientist. Ma Huateng once stated that Tencent has completed the "deep restructuring" of the Tongyi Large Model through talent introduction.

Technical Achievements: On January 28, Tencent announced the open-source release of the image 3.0 version of Tongyi Image, which has entered the top tier in international image editing rankings and has been integrated into the AI assistant "Yuanbao".

With the addition of multiple top experts, the Tencent Tongyi Large Model is accelerating its efforts to catch up with the global first-tier AI technology through the deep integration of reinforcement learning and multi-modal technologies.