• I'm a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Northwestern University, advised by Han Liu. I hold an MS (Electrical and Computer Engineering) degree from University of Rochester and a BS (Software Engineering) degree from Central South University. I'm proud to have graduated from Guiyang No.1 High School. My research interests include LLM/VLM, diffusion models, GNN, and energy-based models.
• If you are interested in collaborating with me in code-LLM, information retrieval, 3D scene generation, or other domains, please don’t hesitate to contact me! Let’s have a chat!
• email: A = "zhenyupan", B = "@u.northwestern", C = ".edu"; address = A + B + C

News

• [2025-03] Excited to introduce MetaSpatial! The first RL-based framework for enhancing 3D spatial reasoning in VLMs, enabling more structured and realistic scene generation for the metaverse, AR/VR, and game development. Check it out here!
• [2025-01] 1 paper was accepted to ICLR 2025
• [2024-12] 1 paper was accepted to LLM4Code workshop in ICSE 2025
• [2024-06] I'm starting a new internship at Tongyi Lab@Alibaba Group.
• [2023-04] 1 paper was accepted to ICS 2023.
• [2023-02] 1 paper was accepted to DAC 2023.
• [2022-11] 1 paper was accepted to AAAI 2023.
• [2022-09] 1 paper was accepted to ICCD 2022.

Awards

• [2025-03] 2025 ICLR Travel Grant
• [2024-09] Northwestern University Fellowship
• [2023-02] 2023 AAAI Student Travel Grant

Talks

• [2024-11] High-quality and Low-latency 3D Molecule Generation
  Presented to AbbVie leadership.

Publication

• MetaSpatial: Reinforcing 3D Spatial Reasoning in VLMs for the Metaverse
  Zhenyu Pan, Han Liu
  [arXiv 2025/03]

• Codev-Bench: How Do LLMs Understand Developer-Centric Code Completion?
  Zhenyu Pan, R.Cao, Y.Cao, Y.Ma, B.Li, F.Huang, H.Liu, Y.Li
  [arXiv 2024/10]

• HeteGraph-Mamba: Heterogeneous Graph Learning via Selective State Space Model
  Zhenyu Pan, Y.Jeong, X.Liu, H.Liu
  [arXiv 2024/05]

• Conv-CoA: Improving Open-domain Question Answering in Large Language Models via Conversational Chain-of-Action
  Zhenyu Pan, H.Luo, M.Li, H.Liu
  [arXiv 2024/05]

• CoRMF: Criticality-Ordered Recurrent Mean Field Ising Solver
  Zhenyu Pan, A.Gilani, E.Kuo, Z.Liu
  [arXiv 2024/03]

• Chain-of-Action: Faithful and Multimodal Question Answering through Large Language Models
  Zhenyu Pan, H.Luo, M.Li, H.Liu
  13th International Conference on Learning Representations [ICLR 2025]

• Do Code LLMs Understand Design Patterns?
  Zhenyu Pan, X.Song, Y.Wang, Y.Cao, B.Li, Y.Li, H.Liu,
  47th International Conference on Software Engineering [LLM4Code@ICSE 2025]

• Ising-Traffic: Using Ising Machine Learning to Predict Traffic Congestion under Uncertainty
  Zhenyu Pan, Anshujit Sharma, J.Hu, Z.Liu, A.Li, H.Liu, M.Huang, T.Geng
  37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence [AAAI 2023]

• Software-Hardware Co-design of Heterogeneous SmartNIC System for Recommendation Models Inference and Training
  A.Guo, Y.Hao, C.Wu, P.Haghi, Zhenyu Pan, M.Si, D.Tao, A.Li, M.Herbordt and T.Geng
  36th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing [ICS 2023]

• Ising-CF: A Pathbreaking Collaborative Filtering Method Through Efficient Ising Machine Learning
  Z.Liu, Y.Yang, Zhenyu Pan, A.Sharma, A.Hasan, C.Ding, A.Li, M.Huang and T.Geng
  60th Design Automation Conference [DAC 2023]

• On the Design of Quantum Graph Convolutional Neural Network in the NISQ-Era and Beyond
  Z.Hu, J.Li, Zhenyu Pan, S.Zhou, L.Yang, C.Ding, O.Khan, T.Geng, W.Jiang
  40th International Conference on Computer Design [ICCD 2022]

Research Experience

• Working as a research intern in Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group, 06/2024 - 11/2024.

Academic Service

• Conference Reviewer: ICCV 2025, CVPR (2024,2025), EMNLP 2024, ACL 2025, LoG 2024, AAAI 2025, NeurIPS (2024, 2025), ICLR 2025, ICML 2025, AISTATS 2025
• Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems

Teaching Assistant

• ECE-101: Intro to Electrical and Computer Engineering
• ECE-113: Circuits and Signals
• ECE-221: Electronic Devices and Circuits
• ECE-222: Analysis & Design of Integrated Circuits