Shanshan Zhong

Shanshan Zhong

钟珊珊

Ph.D. Student

Carnegie Mellon University

Language Technologies Institute

I am a CS Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University starting 2025 Fall, advised by Prof. Chenyan Xiong. Prior to this, I earned both my master's and bachelor's degrees from Sun Yat-sen University, where I was advised by IEEE Fellow Prof. Liang Lin and Prof. Wushao Wen.

My research aims to build intelligent systems that understand the world and learn to reason and act within it. Building on my early work in multimodal learning, I now study language models and agents that reason, remember, and improve through interaction. My research interests include:

  LLM Reasoning, Continual Learning, and Agentic Systems
  1. Evaluation of continual learning methods for agent skill generation [SkillLearnBench]
  2. Low-cost long-context benchmarks [MiniLongBench] and LLM routing [RouterEval]
  3. Chain-of-thought search for optimal reasoning paths [Neural CoT Search]
  4. Creative leap-of-thought thinking for multimodal LLMs [CLoT]
  5. Causality-aware creativity evaluation for multimodal LLMs [LoTbench]
  6. Data-driven analysis of agent skills for extending LLM functionality [Agent Skills]
  7. Evaluation of multi-agent coordination in agentic web [AgentWebBench]
  Web Search and Recommendation
  1. Generative search engine optimization for web content [AutoGEO]
  2. Robust multimodal recommendation via flat local minima [Mirror Gradient]
  3. Variational information bottleneck distillation for multimodal RecSys [DVIB]

News

   Older News

Selected Publications

Here are some of my recent favorite works (* denotes co-first author).

📚 View all publications or visit my Google Scholar.

Experience

Awards

Academic Service

Invited Journal Reviewer: IEEE TKDE, IEEE TMM, IEEE TPAMI

Invited Conference Reviewer: ICLR, ICML, ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, WWW, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI

Get Connected

Undergrad & Master's Students: I'm always excited to work with motivated students. If you're interested in exploring a research collaboration or want to chat about potential projects, feel free to email me and we can set up a time to talk!

Fellow Researchers: I love exchanging ideas and finding unexpected connections across research areas. Whether you're working on something related or just want to brainstorm, don't hesitate to reach out. I'm always happy to chat over a virtual coffee ☕

Life & Community

Off campus, I've long been an active volunteer. I've been lucky to grow with the help and kindness of many people, and I love paying it forward, so my inbox is always open and you're welcome to reach out.

Outside of work you'll find me 🍳 cooking, 🥾 hiking, and playing 🏸 badminton, and I'm picking up 🎾 tennis and 🎸 guitar. If any sound fun and you're around Pittsburgh, let's meet up!