I am currently a first-year M.S. student in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with Prof. Jiaxuan You, fully funded by Graduate Research Assistantship. My research interests lie in Continual Learning and World Modeling.

Before UIUC, I got my Bachelor of Engineering degree from ShanghaiTech University in 06/2026. I was fortunate to work with Prof. Paul Liang at MIT, Prof. Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero at Cambridge and Prof. Ze Xiong at ShanghaiTech.

RESEARCH TOPICS

Social SimulationMultiagent SystemsAgentic AIReinforcement LearningLLM forecasting

Recent Publications

* indicates equal contribution

Figure for CTM-AI: A Blueprint for General AI Inspired by a Model of Consciousness

CTM-AI: A Blueprint for General AI Inspired by a Model of Consciousness

Haofei Yu*, Yining Zhao*, Lenore Blum, Manuel Blum, Paul Pu Liang

The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)

PaperCode
Figure for SOTOPIA-RL: Reward Design for Social Intelligence

SOTOPIA-RL: Reward Design for Social Intelligence

Yining Zhao*, Haofei Yu*, Zhengyang Qi*, Kolby Nottingham, Keyang Xuan, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Hao Zhu, Paul Pu Liang, Jiaxuan You

MTI-LLM @ The 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)

PaperCodeModel
Figure for Building Social World Models with Large Language Models

Building Social World Models with Large Language Models

Haofei Yu, Yining Zhao, Guanyu Lin, Jiaxuan You

The 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026)

PaperCodeData
Figure for Auto-Dreamer: Learning Offline Memory Consolidation for Language Agents

Auto-Dreamer: Learning Offline Memory Consolidation for Language Agents

Chongrui Ye, Yuxiang Liu, Yu Wang, Haofei Yu, Yining Zhao, Ge Liu, Julian McAuley, Jiaxuan You

The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)

Paper
Figure for Can Large Language Models Forecast What Researchers Study Next?

Can Large Language Models Forecast What Researchers Study Next?

Fenghai Li, Zihan Tang, Haofei Yu, Yining Zhao, Jiaxuan You

The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026 main)

Paper
Figure for Implicit U-KAN: Dynamic, Efficient and Interpretable Medical Image Segmentation

Implicit U-KAN: Dynamic, Efficient and Interpretable Medical Image Segmentation

Chun-Wun Cheng*, Yining Zhao*, Yanqi Cheng, Javier A. Montoya-Zegarra, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Angelica I Aviles-Rivero

The 28th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2025)

PaperCode

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign logo

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

2026.8 — Present

M.S. in Computer Science

ShanghaiTech University logo

ShanghaiTech University

2023.9 — 2026.6

B.Eng. in Computer Science

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign logo

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

2024.8 — 2025.5

Exchange Student in Computer Science