❀ Biography
I am now a M.S. student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, under the supervision of Prof. Hai Zhao. Before that, I received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Technology from Southeast University, in 2023. In my undergraduate stage, I have participated in several research projects to explore my interest in computer science. Foremost among them is a personal scientific research project related to order dispatching which raised my curiosity in reinforcement learning and data mining.
Thinking of the current postgraduate stage, it was literally a serendipity that I began to delve into researches in Large Language Models (LLMs). I worked on several interesting research topics related to LLMs, including hallucination, model compression and representation engineering. During my internships at Alibaba, I’ve also gained practical knowledge and skills in LLM Agents and RL. Here is my CV in English and I’m actively seeking fall recruitment opportunities related to LLMs, excited to apply my expertise to the next generation of intelligent systems.
📝 Publications
A full publication list is available on my google scholar page.
(* denotes equal contribution)
- PGPO: Enhancing Agent Reasoning via Pseudocode-style Planning Guided Preference Optimization
Zouying Cao, Runze Wang, Yifei Yang, Xinbei Ma, Xiaoyong Zhu, Bo Zheng, Hai Zhao.
[ACL-Findings, 2025] ||
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- LESA: Learnable LLM Layer Scaling-Up
Yifei Yang, Zouying Cao, Xinbei Ma, Yao Yao, Libo Qin, Zhi Chen, Hai Zhao.
[ACL-Main, 2025] |
- Plan-over-Graph: Towards Parallelable LLM Agent Schedule
Shiqi Zhang*, Xinbei Ma*, Zouying Cao, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao.
[Preprint, 2025] |
- KVSharer: Efficient Inference via Layer-Wise Dissimilar KV Cache Sharing
Yifei Yang, Zouying Cao, Qiguang Chen, Libo Qin, Dongjie Yang, Hai Zhao, Zhi Chen.
[Preprint, 2024] |
- SCANS: Mitigating the Exaggerated Safety for LLMs via Safety-Conscious Activation Steering
Zouying Cao, Yifei Yang, Hai Zhao.
[AAAI Oral, 2025] |
- Head-wise Shareable Attention for Large Language Models
Zouying Cao, Yifei Yang, Hai Zhao.
[EMNLP-Findings, 2024] |
- LaCo: Large Language Model Pruning via Layer Collapse
Yifei Yang, Zouying Cao, Hai Zhao.
[EMNLP-Findings, 2024] |
- AutoHall: Automated Hallucination Dataset Generation for Large Language Models
Zouying Cao, Yifei Yang, Hai Zhao.
[Preprint, 2023] |
💻 Internship
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2025.06 - Present, Tongyi Laboratory, Summer Intern
Topic: RL + LLM Agent
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2024.07 - 2025-06, Taobao & Tmail Group of Alibaba, Research Intern
Topic: LLM Agent Planning
Contribution: We investigate the effectiveness of pseudocode-style plans in agent reasoning, which are more concise and structured than NL plans. Based on two designed planning-oriented rewards, we further introduce PGPO, a preference optimization method that empowers LLM agents with enhanced reasoning capabilities.
🎓 Education
- 2023.09 - 2026.03 (expected), M.S.@SJTU, Computer Science and Technology, Shanghai, China.
- 2019.09 - 2023.06, B.S.@SEU, Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing, China.
🌲 Service
- Reviewers: ACL Rolling Review, AAAI
- Student Works
- Volunteers
🏆 Honors and Awards
Below, I list some Honors and Awards that inspire me deeply.
- 2024-11 Huatai Securities Technology Scholarship
- 2024-11 First Prize Graduate Academic Scholarship in SJTU
- 2023-06 Outstanding Graduates of Southeast University
- 2023-06 Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award of Southeast University
- 2022-10 Huawei Scholarship
- 2021-12 National Scholarship
- 2021-05 Second Price, National English Competition for College Students(NECCS)
- 2020~2022 Three-good Student for three consecutive years
- 2020-12 Scholarship on Social Works in SEU
- 2020-12 President Scholarship in SEU
- 2020-05 Excellent League Cadres, Award for the Models of the Chinese Youth in SEU
- 2020-05 Third Prize, the 17th Southeast University College Student Programming Competition