Shicheng Fan

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

👋 I am a first-year CS Ph.D. student (Aug. 2025–) at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), advised by Prof. Philip S. Yu, collaborating with Prof. Kun Zhang (CMU) and Prof. Lu Cheng (PSU). 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, Agents, LLM Post-training, and AI for Science.

💬 Always happy to chat about research — feel free to reach out!

🌟 Highlight TRACE accepted to ICML 2026 — Trajectory Recovery for Continuous Mechanism Evolution in Causal Representation Learning. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code

🎉 News

• [2026.05] New arXiv: MOSAIC — Module Discovery via Sparse Additive Identifiable Causal Learning for Scientific Time Series. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code
• [2026.04] Excited that TRACE has been accepted to ICML 2026! Trajectory Recovery for Continuous Mechanism Evolution in Causal Representation Learning. 📄 Paper · 💻 Code
• [2026.04] New arXiv: CoEvoSkills — Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification. 📄 Paper
• [2026.01] New arXiv: 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, 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 Under Review
  📄 Paper / 💻 Code

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

Collaborative Publications

• 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 Under Review Co-first author
  📄 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