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Zishun Yu

Computer Science,
The University of Illinois Chicago 🏙️
Chicago, IL 60607
E-mail: z[last-name]32 [@] uic [DOT] edu
[LinkedIn]  [Google Scholar]  [Kaggle] 

News

  • 2025-12: Heading to NeurIPS — see you and catch up in San Diego. 🙌
  • 2025-11: One paper accepted at AAAI 2026.
  • 2025-08: Continuing with Meta FAIR as a part-time student researcher.
  • 2025-07: One paper accepted at COLM 2025.
  • 2025-06: One paper on LLM reasoning available on arxiv. [PDF]
  • 2025-05: One paper on LLM distillation available on arxiv. [PDF]
  • 2025-05: Awarded as ICLR '25 Notable Reviewer.
  • 2025-05: Joining Meta FAIR as a research scientist intern.
  • 2025-05: One paper accepted at ICML 2025.
  • 2025-04: Credited as co-author/contributor to Humanity's Last Exam.
  • 2025-03: One paper accepted at Reasoning and Planning for LLMs workshop @ ICLR 2025.
  • 2025-01: One paper on LLM reasoning available on arxiv. [PDF]
  • 2025-01: Awarded NSF ACCESS Explore as principal investigator.
  • 2024-12: One paper accepted at AAAI 2025.
  • 2024-09: Continuing with Meta GenAI as a part-time student researcher.
  • 2024-05: Joining Meta GenAI @ Menlo Park as a research scientist intern.
  • 2024-05: Presented at ICLR, Vienna, Austria.
  • 2024-04: One paper accepted at UAI 2024.
  • 2024-03: Awarded travel support from ICLR 2024, see you in Vienna. 🇦🇹
  • 2024-02: Presented at ALT, San Diego, California.
  • 2024-01: One paper accepted at ICLR 2024 as spotlight presentation.
  • 2023-12: One paper accepted at ALT 2024.
  • 2023-11: One paper accepted at FMDM workshop @ NeurIPS.
  • 2023-09: Continuing my internship with ByteDance (remotely) @ Chicago.
  • 2023-08: Presented at ICML, Honolulu, Hawaii. 🏝
  • 2023-05: Joining ByteDance @ Bellevue as a research scientist intern.
  • 2023-04: One paper accepted at ICML 2023.
  • 2023-01: Received Kaggle Competition Master title.
  • 2023-01: Won a gold medal 🥇 for Kaggle annual optimization competition 2022.
  • 2022-12: Presented at NeurIPS, New Orleans, Louisiana.
  • 2022-09: One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2022.
  • 2022-05: One paper accepted at UAI 2022.
  • 2022-01: Won a silver medal 🥈 for Kaggle annual optimization competition 2021.
  • 2021-09: One paper accepted at IEEE Trans. ITS.
  • 2021-08: Starting as a Ph.D. student in CS at UIC.
  • 2021-05: Received NSF TRIPODS graduate fellowship (summer 2021).
  • 2021-05: Received M.Sc. in IEOR from UIC.
  • 2021-03: Won a bronze medal 🥉 for Kaggle RANZCR CLiP competition.
  • 2021-01: Won a silver medal 🥈 for Kaggle annual optimization competition 2020.
  • 2018-09: Presented at INFORMS annual meeting, Phoenix, Arizona

About Me

I am a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), fortunate to be advised by Prof. Xinhua Zhang. I do reinforement learning (RL) and large language model (LLM) research. My current research focues on developing principled LLM methods through the lens of RL.


  • Experiences: I interned with ByteDance at Bellevue in ‘23, working on code-llm fine-tuning from an off-policy learning perspective; and with Meta GenAI in ‘24, on LLM reasoning and test-time compute. I will be an incoming research scientist intern with Meta FAIR for ‘25. I earned my M.Sc. from UIC IEOR and my B.Eng. from HUST, and also did an undergraduate research visiting to York University, Canada.

  • Kaggle: Outside of research, I compete on Kaggle, and earned a Kaggle competition Master (rank ~1% of all Kaggle users) in ‘22. I mainly do combinatorics competitions for kaggle, usually mixed integer programming problems. (I have managed to earn a medal🏅 in all the combinatorics competitions I’ve competed in.)

  • I enjoy (occasionally 🤦) alpine hikes/treks🏔, lifting, riichi mahjong🀄, and dabbling in mixology.