CV

M.S.

The University of Texas at Austin

Computer Science

• GPA: 4.0/4.0

B.E. (Hons.)

The University of Auckland

Software Engineering

• First Class Honours · GPA: 7.029/9

Research Collaborator, TalentScope Copilot

Microsoft Research Asia

LLM-driven autonomous web agents for evidence-grounded academic talent discovery.

• Built a browser agent that searches, navigates, collects evidence, and synthesizes candidate profiles.
• Developed multi-agent orchestration, provenance tracking, and evaluation with AutoGen, Playwright, TypeScript, and Python.

Research Collaborator, LLM Knowledge Inheritance

Microsoft Research Asia

Studied how domain knowledge is retained and transferred during language-model fine-tuning.

• Built data and training pipelines for domain-specific QA across multiple knowledge areas.
• Fine-tuned Qwen2.5, Llama 3.1, and Mistral 7B models with LoRA and supervised fine-tuning on multi-node 8×A100 clusters.
• The resulting work was accepted to NeurIPS 2025 Main Conference.

Research Assistant

HKUST(GZ)

LLM preference evaluation, post-training data selection, and social simulation.

• Investigated desirability and information mass as drivers of length bias in LLM-based evaluation.
• Contributed to work published at Findings of EMNLP 2025 and accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main Conference.

Software Engineer II

Resideo (Honeywell Home)

• Built an end-to-end automated test system spanning GitHub Actions, a cloud camera platform, and MQTT-based device validation.
• Designed reliability and reporting architecture for NVR and camera ecosystems across firmware and cloud services.
• Developed synthetic-data and edge-inference workflows with Qwen-Image, CLIP, CNNs, and Ambarella CV72S hardware.

Intermediate Software Engineer

Fisher & Paykel Appliances

• Led development of an automated testing platform integrating hardware, firmware, and higher-level software.
• Developed embedded C software and core control algorithms for refrigerator systems.
• Maintained Docker, Make, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins CI/CD workflows.

Teaching Assistant

The University of Auckland

• Supported courses in advanced databases, object-oriented software development, functional programming, and distributed services.

Machine Learning Intern

Intellifusion

• Developed and optimized face-recognition models for security and surveillance products.

The Strongest Teacher Is Not Always the Best Teacher: Student-Centric Answer Selection

Zhengyu Hu*, Zheyuan Xiao*, Linxin Song, Fengqing Jiang, Yuetai Li, Zhihan Xiong, Yue Liu, Junhao Lin, Yao Su, Lijie Hu, Kaize Ding, Teng Xiao, Radha Poovendran

EMNLP 2026 Main Conference (forthcoming)

* Equal contribution.

Population-Aligned Persona Generation for LLM-based Social Simulation

Zhengyu Hu, Jianxun Lian, Zheyuan Xiao, Max Xiong, Yuxuan Lei, Tianfu Wang, Kaize Ding, Ziang Xiao, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Xing Xie

arXiv:2509.10127

Unveiling the Learning Mind of Language Models: A Cognitive Framework and Empirical Study

Zhengyu Hu, Jianxun Lian, Zheyuan Xiao, Seraphina Zhang, Tianfu Wang, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Xing Xie, Hui Xiong

NeurIPS 2025 Main Conference

Explaining Length Bias in LLM-Based Preference Evaluations

Zhengyu Hu, Linxin Song, Jieyu Zhang, Zheyuan Xiao, Tianfu Wang, Zhengyu Chen, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Jianxun Lian, Kaize Ding, Hui Xiong

Findings of ACL: EMNLP 2025

First in Course Award in Computer Graphics and Image Processing

The University of Auckland

Awarded for the top course performance in semester one of 2020.