Assistant Professor
AI Thrust, HKUST (GZ)
[email protected]
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=qb9STggAAAAJ
https://www.xiaohongshu.com/user/profile/63e87c990000000027028efa
:linkedin: Linkedin
Dr. Yao SHU (舒瑶) is now a tenure-track assistant professor of Artificial Intelligence Thrust at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), starting from April 8, 2025. He was previously a researcher at the Guangdong Lab of AI and Digital Economy (SZ) under the Genius Nova Programme. Before that, Dr. Yao SHU was a senior researcher (Tencent Technical Fellow) at Tencent in 2023 and a Research Fellow (PostDoc.) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2022. He received his PhD from the NUS School of Computing in 2022 under the esteemed guidance of Prof. Bryan Low (Associate Vice President (AI) of NUS and Deputy Director of NUS AI Institute), where he was awarded the IMDA Excellence in Computing Prize for the best PhD thesis in the school, as well as the Dean's Graduate Research Excellence Award for significant research achievements during his doctoral studies. Dr. SHU's research focuses on developing advanced learning and optimization algorithms that are both theoretically sound and practically useful. He is publishing actively in top AI conferences, including ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, and UAI. He also serves as a reviewer for leading AI conferences such as ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, UAI, AISTATS, AAMAS, etc.
Experience
Publication
Project
XPLOR @ HKUST(GZ)
I am looking for self-motivated research assistants and interns. We may work on the following topics or other exciting topics that attract you. If you are interested, please send your CV and transcripts to [email protected].
Research Interests
Recent News
- 2025.06: We have 3 paper (ZoAR, ReDit, OR-MIA) accepted to the workshops @ ICML’25!
- 2025.05: We have 4 paper (R-AdaZO, Ferret, Multinoulli-SCG, WMarkGPT) accepted to ICML’25, and 1 paper (Flexora) accepted to ACL’25! I am honored to be listed as a notable reviewer for ICLR’25!
- 2025.04: I am joining AI Thrust at HKUST (GZ) officially!
- 2025.03: Our EXPO paper is accepted to Reasoning and Planning for LLMs @ ICLR’25!
- 2024.10: Our Ferret paper is accepted to FL@FM-NeurIPS’24 as an oral paper and our Flexora is accepted to FITML-NeurIPS’24!
- 2024.09: Our two papers on “Prompt Optimization” (ZOPO as spotlight!) and one paper on “Parallelized First-Order Optimization” are accepted to NeurIPS 2024!
- 2024.09: Our position paper on “Data-Centric AI in LLMs” is accepted to EMNLP 2024 Findings!
- 2024.09: Our Ferret paper is now available! Come and see how it significantly enhances the federated full-parameter tuning of Large Language Models!
- 2024.06: Our one paper on “Heterogeneous Federated Zeroth-Order Optimization” is accepted to Differentiable Almost Everything workshop @ ICML 2024 and two paper on “Prompt Optimization” are accepted to In-Context Learning workshop @ ICML 2024!
- 2024.05: Our paper on “Prompt Optimization” is accepted to ICML 2024!
- 2024.01: Our paper on “Training-free NAS” is accepted to ICLR 2024!
Presentations
Presentations
Honors & Awards
- Notable Reviewer, ICLR, 2025 (reference)
- Valedictorian for the Class of Ph.D. Graduates, School of Computing, NUS, 2023 (script)
- IMDA Excellence in Computing Prize (Best Ph.D. Thesis), School of Computing, NUS, 2023 (reference)
- Dean’s Graduate Research Excellence Award, School of Computing, NUS, 2022 (reference)
- 2nd prize of 5th AutoML Challenge (AutoML for Temporal Relational Data) in the KDD Cup 2019 provided by 4Paradigm, ChaLearn and Microsoft, June 2019 (our solution, reference)
- Honor of Outstanding Student, HUST, 2015
- 2nd prize for The Chinese Mathematics Competitions (Non-professional), 2013
Academic Services
Services