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Michael Luo

I am currently building a stealth startup. My interests lie broadly in building next generation AI systems and models (e.g. efficient serving and post-training). Previously, I was at Google DeepMind, where I worked on efficient agentic systems for serving and post-training.

I created the Agentica Project, an open-source initiative for post-training language agents via RL, producing models like DeepScaleR, DeepCoder, and DeepSWE with over 2M+ downloads. Our training recipes are published on the rLLM framework.

I received my PhD in EECS from UC Berkeley, where I was advised by Ion Stoica and was part of SkyLab and BAIR. I also hold an M.S. and B.S. (CS & Business) from UC Berkeley.

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Selected Publications

For a full list, see my publications page or Google Scholar.

Agentica Project Agentica Project

An open-source initiative for post-training language agents via reinforcement learning. Agentica models have achieved over 2M+ downloads on HuggingFace. We've optimized RL systems and published training recipes on the rLLM project, now maintained by academia, with over 5K+ stars.

DeepScaleR DeepScaleR: Surpassing o1-preview with a 1.5B Model by Scaling RL
Michael Luo, Sijun Tan, Justin Wong, Xiaoxiang Shi, William Y. Tang, Manan Roongta, Colin Cai, Jeffrey Luo, Li Erran Li, Raluca Ada Popa, Ion Stoica
Notion Blog, Feb. 2025   Blog
DeepCoder DeepCoder: A Fully Open-Source 14B Coder at o3-mini Level
Michael Luo, Sijun Tan, Roy Huang, Ameen Patel, Alpay Ariyak, Qingyang Wu, Xiaoxiang Shi, Rachel Xin, Colin Cai, et al.
Notion Blog, Apr. 2025   Blog
DeepSWE DeepSWE: Training a State-of-the-Art Coding Agent from Scratch by Scaling RL
Michael Luo, Naman Jain, Jaskirat Singh, Sijun Tan, Ameen Patel, Qingyang Wu, Alpay Ariyak, Colin Cai, Tarun Venkat, et al.
Notion Blog, Jun. 2025   Blog
rLLM rLLM: A Framework for Post-Training Language Agents
Sijun Tan*, Michael Luo*, Colin Cai*, Tarun Venkat, Kyle Montgomery, Aaron Hao, Tianhao Wu, Arnav Balyan, Manan Roongta, Chenguang Wang, Li Erran Li, Raluca Ada Popa, Ion Stoica
Notion Blog, Jun. 2025   Blog | Code
Autellix Autellix: An Efficient Serving Engine for LLM Agents as General Programs
Michael Luo, Xiaoxiang Shi, Colin Cai, Tianjun Zhang, Justin Wong, Yichuan Wang, Chi Wang, Yanping Huang, Zhifeng Chen, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2026
Arxiv | Paper

Stylus Stylus: Automatic Adapter Selection for Diffusion Models
Michael Luo, Justin Wong, Brandon Trabucco, Yanping Huang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Zhifeng Chen, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Ion Stoica
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024  Oral
Arxiv | Talk

Starburst Starburst: A Cost-aware Scheduler for Hybrid Cloud
Michael Luo, Siyuan Zhuang, Suryaprakash Vengadesan, Romil Bhardwaj, Justin Chang, Eric J. Friedman, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica
USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC), 2024  Best Paper Award
Paper

SkyPilot SkyPilot: An Intercloud Broker for Sky Computing
Zongheng Yang, Zhanghao Wu, Michael Luo, Wei-Lin Chiang, Romil Bhardwaj, Woosuk Kwon, Siyuan Zhuang, Frank Sifei Luan, Gautam Mittal, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica
USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2023
Paper | Code

Education

University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aug 2021 - Fall 2025
Advised by Ion Stoica

University of California, Berkeley
M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Aug 2020 - May 2021
Advised by Ion Stoica and Ken Goldberg

University of California, Berkeley
B.S. in EECS and Business Administration (Summa Cum Laude), Aug 2016 - May 2020
GPA: 3.98/4

Work Experience
Google DeepMind
Research Scientist, Sept 2023 - March 2025
SaxML Team; Developed and researched efficient agentic systems for serving and post-training.
Anyscale, Ray Core Team
Software Development Engineer Intern, June 2020 - Jan 2021
Scaled distributed RL training and developed asynchronous RL algorithms with Ray/RLlib.
Amazon AI
Machine Learning Engineer Intern, June 2019 - Aug 2019
Created the first embedding/RAG based recommendation system for Amazon Ads.
Cisco Meraki, Smart Camera Team
Computer Vision Engineer Intern, June 2018 - Aug 2018
Developed model-based object detection to track individuals across Meraki cameras.