CV

Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago, 2025 – present
  • Advisor: Prof. Philip S. Yu; Collaborator: Prof. Kun Zhang (CMU)
  • Research: Causality, Agents, LLM Post-training, AI for Science
• B.Eng. in Automation (Control & Robotics), Zhejiang University, Chu Kochen Honors College, 2021 – 2025
  • GPA: 3.98/4.0, Rank: 6/121 (Top 5%), Outstanding Graduate

Publications

• Shicheng Fan, Kun Zhang, Lu Cheng. “TRACE: Trajectory Recovery for Continuous Mechanism Evolution in Causal Representation Learning.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026. arXiv:2601.21135
• 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.” Under Review; manuscript arXiv:2605.29648. (*Co-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; manuscript arXiv:2605.05524.
• 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; manuscript arXiv:2604.01687. (*Co-first author)

Research Experience

• CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills · Co-first author · 2026
  • Studied autonomous skill generation with a co-evolutionary framework coupling a Skill Generator and a Surrogate Verifier
  • Contributed to SkillsBench evaluation and cross-model generalization analysis
• TRACE: CRL under Continuous Mechanism Evolution · First Author · 2025–2026
  • Proposed the first theoretical framework extending causal representation learning from discrete mechanism shifts to continuous transitions; proved joint identifiability via nonlinear ICA and variational inference
  • Designed the TRACE framework based on Mixture-of-Experts, recovering mechanism trajectories via time-varying mixture coefficients, generalizable to unseen intermediate states
• Knowledge-Enhanced RL for LLM Factuality Alignment · Co-1st Author · 2025–present
  • Designing an end-to-end LLM post-training pipeline combining SFT and RL for improved factuality alignment
• MOSAIC: Sparse Additive Identifiable Causal Learning for Scientific Time Series · First Author · 2025–present
  • Proposed MOSAIC, a sparse temporal VAE combining temporal causal learning identifiability with support recovery of observed variables; identifies latents via regime-conditioned temporal variation and recovers sparse observation sets per latent through an additive decoder
  • Established identifiability of ANOVA main-effect supports under smooth mixing functions with finite-sample recovery guarantees
  • Validated across RNA dynamics, solar wind, ENSO climate, Tennessee Eastman process, and tokamak data
• Semantic and Goal-Driven Dexterous Hand Manipulation · B.Sc. Thesis · 2024–2025
  • Reproduced the Text2HOI three-stage framework, matching reported performance on H2O, GRAB, and ARCTIC datasets
  • Proposed a Shadow Hand → MANO cross-embodiment retargeting algorithm; joint training with GraspM3 dataset improved Physical Realism to 0.897 and reduced penetration volume by ~50%

Competitions

• ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge, National Second Prize, 2024
• ACM-IPCC International Parallel Computing Challenge, National Second Prize, 2022

Skills

• Programming: Python, C/C++
• Frameworks & Tools: PyTorch, HuggingFace Transformers, verl/TRL, Git, LaTeX, Linux/HPC (NCSA Delta, NRP Nautilus), CUDA, MPI
• Research Areas: Causal Inference & Causal Representation Learning, LLM Alignment & Anti-Hallucination, Diffusion Models, Embodied Intelligence
• Languages: Chinese (native), English (fluent)

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

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