Deer character looking at a phone
Guanyu Zhu

About

Possibly still alive
Illustration of a cat eating ice cream
Original black cat illustration

I am an undergraduate student in Electronic Science and Technology at South China Agricultural University, based in Guangzhou. My recent work focuses on embodied AI, especially vision-language-action (VLA) systems and world models. I have completely mastered the art of balancing research and life. Let me strike that out until it is true. For now, closing my laptop for five minutes counts as progress.

Over the past year, I worked as an RA at City University of Hong Kong, contributing to SemBid on language representations for auto-bidding, PhysicsMind for unified real-and-simulated physical reasoning evaluation, and Latent Reward Steering for inference-time reasoning guidance. Later, I joined the HCP Lab at Sun Yat-sen University to study tactile perception and world models. I will next join Fudan University to continue my studies and research.

Research journey
City University of Hong KongExploring research directions Sun Yat-sen UniversityTactile sensing and world models Fudan UniversityNext stop

My current interests include VLA and world models for embodied AI.

In my free time, I keep up with The Legend of Hei and hope the next update arrives soon.

News

  • 🎓 Admitted to the College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at Fudan University!

  • 🎉 Latent Reward Steering accepted at EMNLP 2026!Celebration
  • 🎤 Two papers selected for oral presentation at CIKM 2026!
  • 🎉 Two papers accepted at CIKM 2026!Celebration

    On the Role of Language Representations in Auto-Bidding: Findings and Implications and ClinSDT: LLM-Encoded Clinical Semantic Guidance for Sepsis Treatment via Decision Transformer.

  • On the Role of Language Representations in Auto-Bidding: Findings and Implications published on arXiv.

  • PhysicsMind published on arXiv.

Publications

(* equal contribution · † corresponding author)

On the Role of Language Representations in Auto-Bidding: Findings and Implications

Accepted at CIKM 2026 · Oral Presentation
Guanyu Zhu, Jining Luan, Hanwen Du, Xinyu Fang, Sibo Xu, Ersheng Ni, Hongji Li, Jincheng Fang, Ronghao Chen, Huacan Wang, Xuanqi Lan, Yongxin Ni, Yiqi Sun, Youhua Li†
arXiv Code

Latent Reward Steering: An Adaptive Inference-Time Framework that Implicitly Promotes Cognitive Behaviors in Reasoning LLMs

Accepted at EMNLP 2026
Jiakang Li*, Guanyu Zhu*, Can Jin, Chenxi Huang, Dexu Yu, Ronghao Chen, Yang Zhou, Hongwu Peng, Xuanqi Lan, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Youhua Li†
arXiv

PhysicsMind: Sim and Real Mechanics Benchmarking for Physical Reasoning and Prediction in Foundational VLMs and World Models

Chak-Wing Mak*, Guanyu Zhu*, Boyi Zhang*, Hongji Li, Xiaowei Chi, Kevin Zhang, Yichen Wu, Yangfan He, Chun-Kai Fan, Wentao Lu, Kuangzhi Ge, Xinyu Fang, Hongyang He, Kuan Lu, Tianxiang Xu, Li Zhang, Yongxin Ni, Youhua Li, Shanghang Zhang†
arXiv

Beyond Uniform Alignment: LLM-based Recommendation

Zichen Yuan*, Yichen Wu*, Guanyu Zhu, Jiacheng Liu, Xinyu Fang, Lifan Sun, Hanwen Du, Xinyuan Song, Joemon M. Jose, Junchen Fu†, Youhua Li†, Yongxin Ni
PDF

ClinSDT: LLM-Encoded Clinical Semantic Guidance for Sepsis Treatment via Decision Transformer

Accepted at CIKM 2026 · Oral Presentation
Yanyan Wu*, Guanyu Zhu*, Changbin Zhao, Jin Zhang, Dexu Yu, Tianmin Sun, Jining Luan, Chunxiao Li, Hanwen Du, Youhua Li†
Deer character working hard

Research Experience

Internships

  • Aug. 2026 – Present

    Beijing MoKe Robotics Technology Co., Ltd.

    Research Intern · Embodied AI / VLA

  • May 2026 – Aug. 2026

    HCP Lab, Sun Yat-sen University

    Research Intern · Tactile Perception and World Models

Deer character thinking

Awards

  • National Scholarship (2025) · Top 1%
  • National Undergraduate IC Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition · Second Prize
  • China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling · Provincial Second Prize
  • Outstanding Student Leader (2025)
  • Outstanding Academic Conduct Award (2024, 2025)