🐳 About Me

I am a first-year Ph.D. student at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, supervised by Prof. Yongqi Li and co-supervised by Prof. Wenjie Li, where I am supported by the PolyU Presidential PhD Fellowship Scheme (PPPFS).

I obtained my M.S. (2023-2026) in Computer Science at Tsinghua University with Outstanding Thesis Award, supervised by Prof. Yong Jiang and Prof. Qing Li. I received my B.S. (2019-2023) in Computer Science and Technology from Jilin University with the Wang Xianghao Scholarship. Before my undergraduate studies, I attended the Mathematics Experimental Class at Northeast Yucai School (2013-2019) with First Prize in the National High School Mathematics Competition.

My research interests center on adaptive and efficient agentic reasoning, uncertainty-aware computation, model collaboration, and dynamic inference. If you find my work interesting, feel free to contact me for discussion or collaboration.

🔥 News

• [2026.08] 🎉🎉 STIR (first-author) got accepted by EMNLP 2026 Main!
• [2026.08] 🎉🎉 ThinkLeap (co-first-author) got accepted by EMNLP 2026 Main!
• [2026.08] 🎉🎉 TokenRouter (first-author) got accepted by EMNLP 2026 Findings!
• [2026.06] 🎉 I received the Outstanding Thesis Award from Tsinghua University (Top 5%).
• [2026.04] 🎉 I was awarded the PolyU Presidential PhD Fellowship Scheme (PPPFS).
• [2026.02] 🎉🎉 Parallax (co-author) got accepted by CVPR 2026!
• [2025.12] 🎉🎉 Securitas (co-author) got accepted by NSDI 2026!
• [2025.08] 🎉🎉 Reasoning under Uncertainty (first-author) got accepted by EMNLP 2025 Main as an oral presentation!
• [2025.08] 🎉🎉 SpecCoT (co-author) got accepted by EMNLP 2025 Findings!
• [2025.01] 🎉🎉 Helios (first-author) got accepted by WWW 2025!
• [2023.11] 🎉🎉 Loong (co-author) was published online in IEEE Transactions on Computers!
• [2023.05] 🎉🎉 Fuzzy-VGG (co-author) was published online in Information Sciences!

🧑‍💻 Experiences

• Tencent, Jan. 2025 – Mar. 2026
  Research Intern, mentored by Congcong Miao.

• Peng Cheng Laboratory, Jun. 2024 – Jan. 2025
  Research Intern, mentored by Qing Li.

📝 Publications

# denotes equal contribution. * denotes corresponding author.

2026

• STIR: Self-Distilled Latent Tools for Dynamic Control of LLM Reasoning
  Zhenning Shi#, Yijia Zhu#, Junhan Shi, Xun Zhang, Lei Wang, Congcong Miao*.
  EMNLP 2026 Main.
  [paper] [code]

• ThinkLeap: Reasoning Optimization Through Confidence-Guided Cognitive Leap Extraction
  Yijia Zhu#, Zhenning Shi#, Junhan Shi, Xun Zhang, Yong Jiang*, Qing Li.
  EMNLP 2026 Main.
  [code]

• TokenRouter: Uncertainty-Guided Token-Level Routing for Efficient LLM Reasoning
  Zhenning Shi#, Yijia Zhu#, Junhan Shi, Xun Zhang, Congcong Miao, Guorui Xie, Yong Jiang, Qing Li*.
  EMNLP 2026 Findings.
  [code]

• Defending against Traffic Analysis Attacks with Flexible In-Network Obfuscation
  Guorui Xie, Qing Li*, Zhenning Shi, Gianni Antichi, Yijia Zhu, Kejun Li, Changxing Weng, Sebastiano Miano, Yong Jiang, Mingwei Xu.
  USENIX NSDI 2026.
  [paper] [code]

• Parallax to Align Them All: An OmniParallax Attention Mechanism for Distributed Multi-View Image Compression
  Haotian Zhang, Feiyue Long, Yixin Yu, Jian Xue, Haocheng Tang, Tongda Xu, Zhenning Shi, Yan Wang, Siwei Ma, Jiaqi Zhang*.
  CVPR 2026.
  [paper]

2025

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Efficient LLM Inference via Unsupervised Confidence Dilution and Convergent Adaptive Sampling
  Zhenning Shi, Yijia Zhu, Yi Xie, Junhan Shi, Guorui Xie, Haotian Zhang, Yong Jiang*, Congcong Miao, Qing Li*.
  EMNLP 2025 Main, Oral.
  [paper] [code]

• Helios: Learning and Adaptation of Matching Rules for Continual In-Network Malicious Traffic Detection
  Zhenning Shi, Dan Zhao*, Yijia Zhu, Guorui Xie, Qing Li, Yong Jiang*.
  WWW 2025.
  [paper] [code]

• SpecCoT: Accelerating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Speculative Exploration
  Junhan Shi, Yijia Zhu, Zhenning Shi, Dan Zhao, Qing Li*, Yong Jiang*.
  EMNLP 2025 Findings.
  [paper]

2024

• Generating Neural Networks for Diverse Networking Classification Tasks via Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search
  Guorui Xie, Qing Li*, Zhenning Shi, Hanbin Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Yong Jiang, Zhenhui Yuan, Lianbo Ma, Mingwei Xu.
  IEEE Transactions on Computers, 2024.
  [paper] [code]

2023

• Fuzzy-VGG: A fast deep learning method for predicting the staging of Alzheimer's disease based on brain MRI
  Zhaomin Yao, Wenxin Mao, Yizhe Yuan, Zhenning Shi, Gancheng Zhu, Wenwen Zhang*, Zhiguo Wang*, Guoxu Zhang*.
  Information Sciences, 2023.
  [paper]

🏆 Selected Awards

• PolyU Presidential PhD Fellowship Scheme (PPPFS), 2026.
• Outstanding Thesis Award, Tsinghua University (Top 5%), 2026.
• First Prize Scholarship, Tsinghua University (Top 10%), 2024–2025.
• Wang Xianghao Scholarship (Ranked 1/362), 2023.
• CCF Outstanding Undergraduate Award (Top 100 in China), 2022.
• China Collegiate Programming Contest (CCPC), Silver Medal, 2021.
• National Scholarship (Top 1%), 2020–2021.
• ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM-ICPC), Bronze Medal, 2020.
• National Scholarship (Top 1%), 2019–2020.
• National High School Mathematics Competition, First Prize (Ranked 17th in Liaoning Province), 2018.