Shicheng Liu

Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Google Scholar Email: liushch@mit.edu

About me

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, advised by Prof. Julian Shun and Dr. Yada Zhu.
Previously, I obtained my Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University in 2026, advised by Prof. Minghui Zhu.
Before moving to Pennsylvania, I obtained the B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2020.

My research interests are centered around reinforcement learning, explainable machine learning, and language model post-training.

• Reinforcement Learning: Algorithm design for reward shaping, inverse reinforcement learning, and reinforcement learning from human feedback, with applications to robotics and security.

• Explainable machine learning: Algorithm design for explaining RL agents and leveraging the explanation to improve agent performance.

• language model post-training: Reinforcement learning for language model reasoning, agentic reinforcement learning for langauge model fine-tuning under complex and multi-turn interaction scenarios.

Work Experiences

• Postdoctoral Associate, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT, Cambridge, MA, Jan 2026 – Present
  Develop reward shaping algorithms to provide unbiased and informative turn-level reward functions for efficient and accurate optimization of language model agents. (Advisor: Prof. Julian Shun and Dr. Yada Zhu)

• Applied Scientist Intern, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Amazon, Los Angeles, CA, May 2025 – Oct 2025
  Develop a reinforcement learning pipeline that enables language models to generate queries for retrieving information from knowledge graphs. (Mentor: Dr. Zeyu Zhang)

Honors and Awards

• Dr. Nirmal K Bose Dissertation Excellence Award, The Pennsylvania State University (2026)

• Melvin P. Bloom Memorial Graduate Fellowship in Electrical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University (2023)

• Professor and Mrs. Ralph U. Blasingame Memorial Graduate Fellowship in Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University (2022)

• Max And Joan Schlienger Graduate Scholarship in Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University (2021)

Teaching Experiences

• Teaching Assistant, EE 380: Linear Systems (Fall 2025)

• Teaching Assistant, EE 309: Circuit Design (Fall 2023)

Professional Services

• Conference Area Chair: ICLR

• Conference paper review: ICLR, AISTATS, ICML, NeurIPS, ICRA, ACC, CDC, ARR

• Journal paper review: IEEE TAI, TMLR, IEEE TAC, Automatica, IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems