My name is Jingyan Shen. I am a second-year CS Ph.D. student at New York University (Courant Institute), advised by Prof. Matus Telgarsky and Prof. Pavel Izmailov. Previously, I earned my dual master degree from Tsinghua University and Columbia University. Prior to this, I completed my Bachelor’s degree at Wuhan University, majoring in Statistics.

I am broadly interested in machine learning and statistics. My current research studies when and why RL-based post-training improves reasoning in large language models. In particular, I am interested in:

• Understanding how reasoning capabilities emerge from pretraining to post-training
• Scalable verification and RL environments
• Continual self-improvement

I am also fortunate to work with many great scholars and mentors, and I’m deeply grateful for their guidance.

🔬 Selected Publications

(^†: equal contribution)

Understanding Reasoning from Pretraining to Post-Training
Jingyan Shen^†, Ang Li^†, Salman Rahman, Yifan Sun, Micah Goldblum, Matus Telgarsky, Pavel Izmailov
NeurIPS 2026 [Paper] [Code]

When Reasoning Meets Its Laws
Junyu Zhang^†, Yifan Sun^†, Tianang Leng^†, Jingyan Shen^†, Ziyin Liu, Paul Pu Liang, Huan Zhang
NeurIPS 2026 [Paper] [Website]
Efficient Reasoning Workshop at NeurIPS 2025 (Oral Presentation, Best Paper Nomination)

Adversarially Robust Control of Conditional Value-at-Risk via Rockafellar-Uryasev Conformal Inference
Catherine Chen, Jingyan Shen, Zhun Deng, Lihua Lei
ICML 2026 [Paper]

MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning
Jingyan Shen^†, Jiarui Yao^†, Rui Yang^†, Yifan Sun, Feng Luo, Rui Pan, Tong Zhang, Han Zhao
EMNLP 2025 (Main) Outstanding Paper Award 🏆 [Paper]

Improving Data Efficiency for LLM Reinforcement Fine-tuning Through Difficulty-targeted Online Data Selection and Rollout Replay
Yifan Sun^†, Jingyan Shen^†, Yibin Wang^†, Tianyu Chen, Zhendong Wang, Mingyuan Zhou, Huan Zhang
NeurIPS 2025 [Paper]

🔬 Preprints & Workshops

When Can LLMs Learn to Reason with Weak Supervision?
Salman Rahman^†, Jingyan Shen^†, Anna Mordvina, Hamid Palangi, Saadia Gabriel, Pavel Izmailov
Preprint. [Paper] [Project Page]

🎖 Honors and Awards

• ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer, 2026
• Outstanding Paper Award, EMNLP 2025
• MacCracken Fellowship, New York University, 2025
• Outstanding Graduate Student (Top 1%), Tsinghua University, 2024
• Excellent Graduate Thesis Award, Tsinghua University, 2024
• Graduate Fellowship, Columbia University, 2023
• Outstanding Undergraduate Student, Wuhan University, 2021
• National Scholarship for Undergraduates, Ministry of Education of China, 2018

👾 Industry Experience

• 2026.05 - 2026.08, Research Intern at Microsoft Research (NYC)
  • I was very fortunate to work with Stephanie Milani, Akshay Krishnamurthy, and Jordan T. Ash.
• 2024.02 - 2025.06, Full-time machine learning engineer at Pinterest

🐰 Miscs

I value the diversity and richness of life, and I hold a deep respect for beauty and purity in all their forms. Beyond research, I enjoy playing table tennis and tennis, playing drums, losing myself in a good book, or discovering new places through travel.