Shicheng Fan
๐ I am a first-year CS Ph.D. student (Aug. 2025โ) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), advised by Prof. Lu Cheng. I received my B.Eng. from Zhejiang University, where I worked on dexterous robotic manipulation with Prof. Qi Ye.
My research interests center on Causality and its applications in AI for Science, Reinforcement Learning, and Large Language Models.

๐ News
- [2026.01] New preprint: TRACE โ Trajectory Recovery for Continuous Mechanism Evolution in Causal Representation Learning. ๐ Paper
- [2025.08] Started Ph.D. at UIC! ๐
๐ Education
University of Illinois Chicago , Ph.D. in Computer Science , 08/2025 - present
Zhejiang University , B.Eng. in Automation (Control & Robotics) , 09/2021 - 06/2025
Chu Kochen Honors College ยท GPA: 3.98/4.0 ยท Rank: 6/121 (Top 5%)
Chu Kochen Honors College ยท GPA: 3.98/4.0 ยท Rank: 6/121 (Top 5%)
๐ Publications and Preprints
First-author
- Shicheng Fan, Kun Zhang, Lu Cheng. TRACE: Trajectory Recovery for Continuous Mechanism Evolution in Causal Representation Learning Under Review
๐ Paper / ๐ฆ Code (coming soon)
Collaborative Publications
- Hanyu Su, Shicheng Fan, Yifan Cui, Lu Cheng. Conformalized Proximal Causal Inference with a Single Proxy. Under Review
๐ Awards & Honors
- Academic Excellence Model, Zhejiang University, 2022, 2023, 2024
- Outstanding Students in AI&ML Summer Project, University of Cambridge, 2023
- National Second Prize, Advanced Mathematics Competition of China, 2022
๐ Competitions
- ACM-IPCC (International Parallel Computing Challenge), National Second Prize, 2022
- Optimized program runtime from 13min to 200ms (~4000x speedup) using MPI, CUDA, SIMD
- ASC (Asia Supercomputer Community Challenge), National Second Prize, 2024
- Built full HPC system from hardware to software; optimized LLM inference with KV Cache & batching strategies