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, World Model, Agent, LLM Post Training
• 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
• 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.
• 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; arXiv:2605.29648.
• 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; arXiv:2605.05524.
• 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; ResearchGate, June 2026. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32395.86569.

Selected Research Experience

• Causal Representation Learning · 2025–present
  • Developed TRACE and MOSAIC, focusing on identifiability, mechanism evolution, and scientific time series.
• LLM Agents and Post Training · 2025–present
  • Worked on agent skill learning, factuality alignment, process supervision, and data synthesis for LLM agents.
• Dexterous Hand Manipulation · B.Sc. thesis · 2024–2025
  • Studied goal driven hand object interaction and cross embodiment retargeting.

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, World Model, Agent, LLM Post Training
• 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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