Yucheng Shi

史淯城
Tencent Hunyuan LLM Frontier, Seattle — Research Scientist
Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Georgia
Advised by Prof. Ninghao Liu

I work on agent reinforcement learning and self-evolving AI — building agents that improve through environmental interaction and self-generated experience. My current focus is agents for long-horizon terminal work: acting through real tools, training on executable environments, and learning from the trajectories they create.

Yucheng Shi

News

Jun 2026New research note: Harness Handbook, with Ruhan Wang. Note
Summer 2026Leading a research program on self-evolving terminal agents with four student researchers.
Feb 2026Joined Tencent Hunyuan LLM Frontier in Seattle as a full-time Research Scientist.
Jan 2026Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Georgia. Ph.D.
Jan 2026Preprint: MobileGUI-RL — online RL for mobile GUI agents. arXiv
May 2025Papers accepted at ICML 2025 and BIBM 2025. ICML
Apr 2025Received Dissertation Completion Award Assistantship for 2025–2026. Award
Jan 2025Three papers accepted at ICLR 2025. ICLR
Nov 2024MKRAG received Distinguished Paper Award at AMIA 2024. Award

Current Research

In summer 2026 I am leading a research program on self-evolving terminal agents, working with Zhongzhi Li, Ruhan Wang, Zongxia Li, and Junyao Yang. We study how an agent training system can improve along three coupled axes: the environments it trains on, the harness through which it acts, and the learning signals extracted from long trajectories. Notes and artifacts are released as the work matures.

A behavior-first map that helps people and coding agents locate where a harness behavior lives before editing it.
Agent systems · Ruhan Wang · Jun 2026
Forty-six containerized tasks across 21 domains, with deterministic subtask grading and meaningful partial credit.
Benchmark · Zongxia Li · paper forthcoming
Dive into Staleness Analysis in Asynchronous RL
A mathematical and empirical guide to rollout–training mismatch, with a staleness-adaptive trust region for controlling it.
Agentic RL · Junyao Yang · note forthcoming
Continual Task Synthesis for Terminal Agents
Turning seed environments, failed trajectories, and recovery traces into SFT- and RL-ready terminal tasks.
Data engine · Zhongzhi Li · in progress

Experience

Tencent Hunyuan LLM Frontier, Seattle Feb 2026 – Present
Research Scientist
  • Agent RL and self-evolving AI.
Netflix Sep – Dec 2025
ML Research Intern  ·  Dr. Ying Li, Dr. Yu Wang
  • Content recommendation with large language models.
Tencent AI Lab, Seattle May – Aug 2025
Research Scientist Intern  ·  Dr. Wenhao Yu
  • MobileGUI-RL: online RL for mobile GUI agent automation.
  • Multimodal AI for mobile UI understanding.
Harvard Medical School May – Sep 2024
Student Researcher  ·  Dr. Xiang Li
  • Post-trained LLaMA-3 70B on 6.5M+ radiology reports.
  • Built SearchRAG for medical question answering.

Selected Publications full list →

Learning to Build the Environment: Self-Evolving Reasoning RL via Verifiable Environment Synthesis
Yucheng Shi, Zhenwen Liang, Kishan Panaganti, Dian Yu, Wenhao Yu, Haitao Mi
Preprint 2026
MobileGUI-RL: Advancing Mobile GUI Agent through Reinforcement Learning in Online Environment
Yucheng Shi*, Wenhao Yu*, Zaitang Li, Yonglin Wang, Hongming Zhang, Ninghao Liu, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu
arXiv 2025 · Paper
Enhancing Cognition and Explainability of Multimodal Foundation Models with Self-Synthesized Data
Yucheng Shi, Quanzheng Li, Jin Sun, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu
ICLR 2025 · Paper · Code · Model · 5k+ HF downloads
CORTEX: Concept-Oriented Token Explanation in Vector-Quantized Generative Models
Tianze Yang*, Yucheng Shi*, Mengnan Du, Xuansheng Wu, Qiaoyu Tan, Jin Sun, Ninghao Liu
ICML 2025 · Paper · Code
Black-box Backdoor Defense via Zero-shot Image Purification
Yucheng Shi, Mengnan Du, Xuansheng Wu, Zihan Guan, Jin Sun, Ninghao Liu
NeurIPS 2023 · Paper · Code
MKRAG: Medical Knowledge Retrieval Augmented Generation for Medical Question Answering
Yucheng Shi*, Shaochen Xu*, Tianze Yang*, Zhengliang Liu, Tianming Liu, Quanzheng Li, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu
AMIA 2024 · Paper · Code · Distinguished Paper Award

Contact

The best way to reach me is email: mailofsyc@gmail.com. I am always glad to talk with people working on self-evolving agents, long-horizon interaction, and agent post-training.