Zeru Shi (是泽儒)

Zeru Shi (是泽儒)

Hello, I am Zeru, a first year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Rutgers University. I am honored to be guided by Prof.Ruixiang Tang. I received my B.E. degree in Software Engineering at Dalian University of Technology

My research interests mainly focus on:

  • LLM/VLM Reasoning and Post-training: I am highly interested in post-training for LLMs and VLMs. My focus is on developing more effective reinforcement learning algorithms, as well as leveraging simple and interpretable methods, to improve reasoning capabilities through post-training.
  • Agentic AI: I am also interested in Agentic AI, especially in the design of agent memory. I am particularly drawn to a storage centric perspective, where memory is treated as a first-class component. My goal is to build principled memory systems that can significantly enhance agents’ capabilities in complex reasoning and real world problem solving.

My CV is here: Zeru’s CV

I am always open to research collaborations. If you are interested in my previous work or would like to discuss potential ideas, please feel free to contact me.

🔥 News

  • 2026.04:  🎉🎉 I will join NVIDIA as a research intern in 2026 summer. Welcome to reach out for collaboration and discussion.
  • 2025.10:  🎉🎉 I am honered to be selected as a Rutgers Climate and Energy Institute (RCEI) Fellowship. Thanks to my professor!
  • 2025.10:   Please check our preprint about Meaningless Tokens, Meaningful Gains: How Activation Shifts Enhance LLM Reasoning
  • 2025.09:   I have been invited to be a reviewer for ICLR 2026.
  • 2025.09:  🎉🎉 One paper has been accepted by IEEE TCSVT (IF=11.1), thanks to my all collaborators!
  • 2025.08:  🎉🎉 One paper has been accepted by EMNLP 2025(Main), thanks to my all collaborators!
  • 2025.03:  🎉🎉 I will join Rutgers University as a PhD student in 2025 Fall, supervised by Prof. Ruixiang Tang!
  • 2025.01:  🎉🎉 Our work From Commands to Prompts: LLM-based Semantic File System is accepted by ICLR 2025, many thanks to my collaborators!
  • 2024.11:  🎉🎉 I get China National Scholarship.

📷 Publication

ICLR2025
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From Commands to Prompts: LLM-based Semantic File System
Zeru Shi*, Kai Mei*, Mingyu Jin, Yongye Su, Chaoji Zuo, Wenyue Hua, Wujiang Xu, Yujie Ren, Zirui Liu, Mengnan Du, Dong Deng, Yongfeng Zhang

[Arxiv], [GitHub]

IEEE TCSVT(IF=11.1)
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SeFENet: Robust Deep Homography Estimation via Semantic-Driven Feature Enhancement
Zeru Shi, Zengxi Zhang, Kemeng Cui, Ruizhe An, Jinyuan Liu, Zhiying Jiang

[Arxiv]

EMNLP2025 (Main)
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Castle: Causal Cascade Updates in Relational Databases with Large Language Models
Yongye Su, Yucheng Zhang, Zeru Shi, Bruno Ribeiro, Elisa Bertino

[Arxiv]

📝 Pre-Print

Arxiv
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Meaningless Tokens, Meaningful Gains: How Activation Shifts Enhance LLM Reasoning
Zeru Shi, Yingjia Wan, Zhenting Wang, Qifan Wang, Fan Yang, Elisa Kreiss, Ruixiang Tang

[Arxiv], [GitHub]

Arxiv
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Auto-Prompt Generation is Not Robust:Prompt Optimization Driven by Pseudo Gradient
Zeru Shi, Zhenting Wang, Yongye Su, Weidi Luo, Hang Gao, Fan Yang, Ruixiang Tang, Yongfeng Zhang

[Arxiv], [GitHub]

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • 2025.10 Rutgers Climate and Energy Institute (RCEI) Fellowship, USA
  • 2025.6 Dalian excellent undergraduate graduates, China
  • 2024.11 National Scholarship, China
  • 2023.9 Special scholarship of NOK Corporation, Japan

📖 Educations

  • 2021.09 - 2025.06, Dalian University of Technology, ISE, Liaoning, Undergraduate
  • 2025.09 - Present, Rutgers University, Computer Science, New Brunswick, Ph.D.

💻 Internships

🕵️ Services

  • Conference Reviewer: ICLR 2026, ICML 2026, ARR