Hi!
I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), under the supervision of Prof. Jiawei Han.
I received my Bachelor's degree from the IEEE honored class, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in 2022. In my undergraduate years, I was advised by Prof. Hai Zhao and collaborated with Zhuosheng Zhang at SJTU.
I am actively looking for research internships for Summer 2026. Feel free to reach out if you think I am a good fit! Research Interests
My research interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning.
Generally, I’m interested in the following:
Enhancing complex reasoning ability of LLMs and self-evolving LLM agents;
Post-training of LLMs in a data-centric sense;
AI for Science specifically in the domain of chemistry;
Recent News
01/2026: Two papers on agent memory and VLM steering are accepted to ICLR 2026.
09/2025: One paper on LLM reasoning is accepted to NeurIPS 2025, and another paper on functional group reasoning is accepted to NeurIPS DB track. See you in San Diego!
01/2025: Two papers on AI software engineering and chemistry reasoning are accepted to ICLR 2025.
Recent Publications
Please see my Google Scholar profile for the full list.
ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memory
Siru Ouyang, Jun Yan, I-Hung Hsu, Yanfei Chen, Ke Jiang, Zifeng Wang, Rujun Han, Long Le, Samira Daruki, Xiangru Tang,
Vishy Tirumalashetty, George Lee, Mahsan Rofouei, Hangfei Lin, Jiawei Han, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
ICLR 2026. [Paper]
RAST: Reasoning Activation in LLMs via Small-model Transfer
Siru Ouyang, Xinyu Zhu, Zilin Xiao, Minhao Jiang, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han
Siru Ouyang, Wenhao Yu, Kaixin Ma, Zilin Xiao, Zhihan Zhang, Mengzhao Jia, Jiawei Han, Hongming Zhang, Dong Yu
Research Experiences
Google Cloud AI Research, 05/2025 – presentResearch intern, supervised by Dr. Jun Yan.
Microsoft Research (Redmond) 05/2023 – 12/2023Research intern, supervised by Dr. Shuohang Wang.
Georgia Institute of Technology, 06/2021 – 11/2021Research assistant, supervised by Prof. Diyi Yang.
Selected Honors & Awards
NeurIPS Scholar Award. 2025
WWW Travel Award. 2025
Richard T. Cheng Endowed Fellowship, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 2022
Outstanding Graduate at SJTU, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 2022
Rongchang Scientific and Technological Innovation Scholarship (Rank 1st in the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 2021
SenseTime Scholarship (31 out of all students for artificial intelligence in China), SenseTime Incorporation. 2021
Google Women Tech Makers Scholarship (110 out of 2800 students around the whole Pacific Rim), Google. 2020
SJTU Academic Scholarship (5% of all the students in the School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering), Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 2019 and 2020
Miscellaneous
I love playing the piano. I have been practicing the piano ever since I was 5 (I still try to find time practicing in my Ph.D. journey). I am a crazy fan of Frédéric Chopin, and I am also fond of music pieces arranged by Animenz.
Some of my repertoires include Ballade No.1 Op.23, Polonaise in A-flat major, Op.53, My Dearest, Unravel, and Prelude g-moll, op.23, No.5
I have a cat Turing.
Updated 1/30/2026.