Shicheng Fan

📧 Email / 🎓 Google Scholar / 😺 Github / 💼 LinkedIn

👋 I am a CS Ph.D. student (Aug. 2025–) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Philip S. Yu, and to collaborate with Prof. Kun Zhang (CMU). I received my B.Eng. from Zhejiang University (Chu Kochen Honors College), where I worked on dexterous robotic manipulation with Prof. Qi Ye.

My research interests center on Causality, World Model, Agent, and LLM Post Training.

💬 Always happy to chat about research. Feel free to reach out!

🎉 News

• [2026.08] New preprint: ACWorld, Agentic Commerce World: An Auditable and Verifiable Environment for Vibe Commerce. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code
• [2026.07] New preprint: Paying for Honesty Without Knowing the Truth, Reputation-Penalty Design for LLM Marketplace Agents. 📄 Paper
• [2026.07] 🌟 Highlight CoEvoSkills accepted to COLM 2026. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code
• [2026.06] New preprint: Scaling LLM Agent Learning with Data Synthesis, a comprehensive survey. 📄 Paper
• [2026.05] New preprint: CorVer, Verifiable Rewards Beyond Math and Code: Lightweight Corpus-Grounded Process Supervision for Factual Question Answering. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code
• [2026.05] New preprint: MOSAIC, Module Discovery via Sparse Additive Identifiable Causal Learning for Scientific Time Series. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code
• [2026.04] 🌟 Highlight TRACE accepted to ICML 2026. Trajectory Recovery for Continuous Mechanism Evolution in Causal Representation Learning. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code
• [2026.04] New preprint: CoEvoSkills, Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code
• [2026.01] New preprint: TRACE, Trajectory Recovery for Continuous Mechanism Evolution in Causal Representation Learning. 📄 Paper
• [2025.08] Started Ph.D. at UIC! 🎓

🎓 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 · GPA: 3.98/4.0 · Rank: 6/121 (Top 5%) · Outstanding Graduate

📝 Publications and Preprints

First Author

• Shicheng Fan, Kun Zhang, Lu Cheng. TRACE: Trajectory Recovery for Continuous Mechanism Evolution in Causal Representation Learning ICML 2026
  📄 Paper / 💻 Code

• Hanrong Zhang, Shicheng Fan, Henry Peng Zou, Yankai Chen, Zhenting Wang, Jiayu Zhou, Chengze Li, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yifei Yao, Kening Zheng, Xue Liu, Xiaoxiao Li, Philip S. Yu. CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification COLM 2026
  📄 Paper / 💻 Code

• Shicheng Fan, Mingdai Yang, Duohao Wang, Canyu Chen, Yongfeng Zhang, Hua Wei, Manling Li, Julian McAuley, Kun Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Kejing Yu, Zhiwei Liu. Agentic Commerce World: An Auditable and Verifiable Environment for Vibe Commerce Preprint
  📄 Paper / 💻 Code

• Shicheng Fan, Haochang Hao, Dehai Min, Weihao Liu, Philip S. Yu, Lu Cheng. Verifiable Rewards Beyond Math and Code: Lightweight Corpus-Grounded Process Supervision for Factual Question Answering Preprint
  📄 Paper / 💻 Code

• Shicheng Fan, Nour Elhendawy, Jianle Sun, Ke Fang, Kun Zhang, Yihang Wang, Lu Cheng. MOSAIC: Module Discovery via Sparse Additive Identifiable Causal Learning for Scientific Time Series Preprint
  📄 Paper / 💻 Code

Collaborative Publications

• Mingdai Yang, Shicheng Fan, Kejing Yu, Duohao Wang, Li Sun, Hao Peng, Philip S. Yu, Zhiwei Liu. Paying for Honesty Without Knowing the Truth: Reputation-Penalty Design for LLM Marketplace Agents Preprint
  📄 Paper

• Hanrong Zhang, Yankai Chen, Shicheng Fan, Dehai Min, Shaowen Chen, …, Dawn Song, Philip S. Yu, Xue Liu. Scaling LLM Agent Learning with Data Synthesis: A Comprehensive Survey Preprint
  📄 Paper

🏆 Awards & Honors

• Outstanding Graduate, Zhejiang University, 2025
• Academic Excellence Model, Zhejiang University, 2022, 2023, 2024
• Outstanding Student in AI&ML Summer Project, University of Cambridge, 2023
• National Second Prize, Advanced Mathematics Competition of China, 2022

🏅 Competitions

• 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
• ACM-IPCC (International Parallel Computing Challenge), National Second Prize, 2022
  • Optimized program runtime from 13min to 200ms (~4000x speedup) using MPI, CUDA, SIMD