Searching for PhD opportunities (Fall 2026)

Hi, I'm Shuyao. Chasing AGI with efficiency and agency.

Final-year CS undergrad at NUS. I explore two frontiers: improving the efficiency of singular models and designing agentic systems that are efficient and general.

Incoming Research Intern at Z.ai

Working with Yu Meng (UVA) and Bryan Hooi (NUS)

Shuyao Xu

Research

Efficiency

Shuyao Xu, C. Peng, J. Long, W. Xu, W. Chu, Y. Qi

Standard distillation discards incorrect teacher responses. We propose Reinforcement Distillation, utilizing negative reasoning traces as signals to improve student model performance on reasoning tasks.

Agency

Agentic Test-Time Scaling
Advisors: Prof. Yu Meng & Prof. Bryan Hooi

Parallel test-time scaling systems are usually dictated by human designs, which are not always optimal. We explore how LLM-powered agents can autonomously decide when and how to scale compute.

Fully Agentic Test-Time Scaling — LLM agents that autonomously decide when and how to scale compute.
Tournament-based Test-Time Scaling — Competition-driven reasoning to solve hard problems.

Experience

Z.ai

Joining in Jan 2026
Research Intern · AutoGLM Team

TikTok

Jun – Dec 2025
Machine Learning Engineer Intern
  • Improved account search relevance.
  • Developing personalized reward models for Tako AI bot.

INF AI

Dec 2024 – May 2025
Research Intern · Host: Dr. Weidi Xu
  • Post-trained INFLogic-32B-RL via online RL. SOTA on ZebraLogicBench (85.1%).

Education

National University of Singapore 2022 – 2026
B.Comp in Computer Science (Honours) · GPA: 4.79 / 5.00
Stanford University Summer 2023
Summer Session · Computer Graphics (A+), AI (A)

Teaching & Open Source

CS2103T Software Engineering TA NUS · Fall 2024 · Feedback: 4.4/5.0
MarkBind Contributor Features & mentoring junior contributors