About me
- 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 generation, information retrieval, 3D world 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
- [2025-10] 1 paper was accepted to Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications.
- [2025-10] Honored to receive the Lambda's Research Grant Program.
- [2025-09] 1 paper was accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
- [2025-09] 1 paper was accepted to Nature Computational Science.
- [2025-09] I'm starting a new internship as an applied scientist intern at Amazon in Seattle.
- [2025-08] 2 papers were accepted to the Trustworthy FMs workshop in ICCV 2025.
- [2025-07] Honored to receive the NVIDIA Academic Grant for our project on Interactive Spatial Reasoning and 3D Scene Generation with RL-Enhanced VLMs! Thanks to NVIDIA for supporting academic innovation.
- [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
- [2025-10] Lambda's Research Grant Program: $ 1,000
- [2025-10] 2025 NeurIPS Scholar Award
- [2025-07] NVIDIA Academic Grant: $ 110,000
- [2025-03] 2025 ICLR Travel Grant
- [2024-09] Northwestern University Fellowship: $ 45,000
- [2023-02] 2023 AAAI Student Travel Grant
Talks
- 
                            [2025-05] MetaSpatial: Reinforcing 3D Spatial Reasoning in VLMs for the Metaverse
 Presented to Salesforce.
- 
                            [2024-11] High-quality and Low-latency 3D Molecule Generation
 Presented to AbbVie leadership.
Publications
- 
                                    AdvEvo-MARL: Shaping Internalized Safety through Adversarial Co-Evolution in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning 
 Zhenyu Pan, Yiting Zhang, Zhuo Liu, Yolo Yunlong Tang, Zeliang Zhang, Haozheng Luo, Yuwei Han, Jianshu Zhang, Dennis Wu, Hong-Yu Chen, Haoran Lu, Haoyang Fang, Manling Li, Chenliang Xu, Philip S. Yu, Han Liu
 [arXiv 2025/10]
- 
                                    MetaSpatial: Reinforcing 3D Spatial Reasoning in VLMs for the Metaverse 
 Zhenyu Pan, Han Liu
 [arXiv 2025/03]
- 
                                    MetaFind: Scene-Aware 3D Asset Retrieval for Coherent Metaverse Scene Generation 
 Zhenyu Pan, Yucheng Lu, Han Liu
 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems [NeurIPS 2025]
- 
                                    Chain-of-Action: Faithful and Multimodal Question Answering through Large Language Models 
 Zhenyu Pan, Haozheng Luo, Manling Li, Han Liu
 13th International Conference on Learning Representations [ICLR 2025]
- 
                                    Video-LMM Post-Training: A Deep Dive into Video Reasoning with Large Multimodal Models 
 Yunlong Tang, Jing Bi, Pinxin Liu, Zhenyu Pan, Zhangyun Tan, Qianxiang Shen, Jiani Liu, Hang Hua, Junjia Guo, Yunzhong Xiao, Chao Huang, Zhiyuan Wang, Susan Liang, Xinyi Liu, Yizhi Song, Yuhe Nie, Jia-Xing Zhong, Bozheng Li, Daiqing Qi, Ziyun Zeng, Ali Vosoughi, Luchuan Song, Zeliang Zhang, Daiki Shimada, Han Liu, Jiebo Luo, Chenliang Xu
 [arXiv 2025/10]
- 
                                    AdvEvo-MARL: Shaping Internalized Safety through Adversarial Co-Evolution in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning 
 Zhenyu Pan, Yiting Zhang, Zhuo Liu, Yolo Yunlong Tang, Zeliang Zhang, Haozheng Luo, Yuwei Han, Jianshu Zhang, Dennis Wu, Hong-Yu Chen, Haoran Lu, Haoyang Fang, Manling Li, Chenliang Xu, Philip S. Yu, Han Liu
 [arXiv 2025/10]
- 
                                    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, Rongyu Cao, Yongchang Cao, Yingwei Ma, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Han Liu, Yongbin Li
 [arXiv 2024/10]
- 
                                    HeteGraph-Mamba: Heterogeneous Graph Learning via Selective State Space Model 
 Zhenyu Pan*, Yoonsung Jeong*, Xiaoda Liu, Han Liu
 [arXiv 2024/05]
- 
                                    Conv-CoA: Improving Open-domain Question Answering in Large Language Models via Conversational Chain-of-Action 
 Zhenyu Pan*, Haozheng Luo*, Manling Li, Han Liu
 [arXiv 2024/05]
- 
                                    CoRMF: Criticality-Ordered Recurrent Mean Field Ising Solver 
 Zhenyu Pan, Ammar Gilani, En-Jui Kuo, Zhuo Liu
 Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications
- 
                                    MetaFind: Scene-Aware 3D Asset Retrieval for Coherent Metaverse Scene Generation 
 Zhenyu Pan, Yucheng Lu, Han Liu
 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems [NeurIPS 2025]
- 
                                    SciSciGPT: Advancing Human-AI Collaboration in the Science of Science 
 Erzhuo Shao, Yifang Wang, Yifan Qian, Zhenyu Pan, Han Liu, Dashun Wang
 [Nature Computational Science 2025]
- 
                                    Evo-MARL: Co-Evolutionary Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Internalized Safety 
 Zhenyu Pan, Yiting Zhang, Yutong Zhang, Jianshu Zhang, Haozheng Luo, Yuwei Han, Dennis Wu, Hong-Yu Chen, Philip S. Yu, Manling Li, Han Liu
 International Conference on Computer Vision 2025 [T2FM@ICCV 2025]
- 
                                    FairReason: Balancing Reasoning and Social Bias in MLLMs 
 Zhenyu Pan, Yutong Zhang, Jianshu Zhang, Haoran Lu, Haozheng Luo, Yuwei Han, Philip S Yu, Manling Li, Han Liu
 International Conference on Computer Vision 2025 [T2FM@ICCV 2025]
- 
                                    Chain-of-Action: Faithful and Multimodal Question Answering through Large Language Models 
 Zhenyu Pan, Haozheng Luo, Manling Li, Han Liu
 13th International Conference on Learning Representations [ICLR 2025]
- 
                                    Do Code LLMs Understand Design Patterns? 
 Zhenyu Pan, Xingyu Song, Yifan Wang, Yongchang Cao, Binhua Li, Yongbin Li, Han 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, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Zhuo Liu, Ang Li, Han Liu, Michael Huang, Tony Geng
 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence [AAAI 2023]
- 
                                    Software-Hardware Co-design of Heterogeneous SmartNIC System for Recommendation Models Inference and Training 
 Anqi Guo, Yuchen Hao, Chunshu Wu, Pouya Haghi, Zhenyu Pan, Min Si, Dingwen Tao, Ang Li, Martin Herbordt, Tong Geng
 36th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing [ICS 2023]
- 
                                    Ising-CF: A Pathbreaking Collaborative Filtering Method Through Efficient Ising Machine Learning 
 Zhuo Liu, Yanjun Yang, Zhenyu Pan, Anshujit Sharma, Aamir Hasan, Caiwen Ding, Ang Li, Michael Huang, Tong Geng
 60th Design Automation Conference [DAC 2023]
- 
                                    On the Design of Quantum Graph Convolutional Neural Network in the NISQ-Era and Beyond 
 Zihao Hu, Junyu Li, Zhenyu Pan, Shangshang Zhou, Lvzhou Yang, Caiwen Ding, Omer Khan, Tong Geng, Weiwen Jiang
 40th International Conference on Computer Design [ICCD 2022]
Research Experience
- Working as an applied scientist intern at Amazon, Seattle, 09/2025 - 12/2025
- Working as a research intern in Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group, 06/2024 - 11/2024
Academic Service
- Conference Reviewer: [ICCV 2025], [CVPR (2024,2025,2026)], [EMNLP 2024], [ACL 2025], [LoG 2024,2025], [AAAI 2025,2026], [NeurIPS (2024, 2025)], [ICLR 2025], [ICML 2025], [AISTATS 2025,2026]
- Journal Reviewer: [IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems], [IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing], [IEEE Transactions on Games]
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
