Ph.D. Student · Capital One Fellow
Zhenyu (Fischer) Lei
E-mail: vjd5zr [at] virginia [dot] edu
Address: Charlottesville, VA, USA
I am a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia, advised by Prof. Jundong Li, and a Capital One PhD Fellow. Before that, I received my B.S. in Physics from Xi'an Jiaotong University, where I was lucky to join the LUD Lab. I have also interned at AT&T as an Applied Scientist.
I am interested in LLM agents, memory, recursive self-improvement (RSI), and distillation, as well as graph and time series learning. I am open to collaborations and discussions — feel free to reach out by email or the message box! Actively looking for research internships!
News
LatestSep 2026One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (AdaST).
Aug 2026Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2026 (one Main (MemSuit), one Findings (TeacherGRPO)).
June 2026Honored to receive the Capital One PhD Fellowship.
Jan 2026One paper accepted at ICLR 2026 (REdit).
Jan 2026One paper accepted at ISBI 2026 (BrainTAP).
Publications
All publications →
Selected Research
Grounding Memory Summarization in Utility Intent
AdaST: Adaptive Coupling for Spatial-Temporal Forecasting
* equal contribution
Background
Education & Experience
UVA
University of Virginia, USAPh.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering · Advisor: Prof. Jundong Li
2023.08 – present
XJTU
Xi'an Jiaotong University, ChinaB.S. in Physics (Honor) · GPA 89.5/100 · Advisor: Prof. Minnan Luo
2019.08 – 2023.07
AT&T
AT&T, Bedminster, NJApplied Scientist Intern · Host: Dr. Qiong Wu
2025.06 – 2025.08
Recognition
Selected Honors & Awards
Capital One PhD Fellowship, 2025–26WSDM Student Travel AwardPresidential Fellowship in Collaborative Neuroscience, UVAPrecision Health Initiative Trainee Travel Stipend, UVATYDE Student Training Award, UVAEngineering Academic Commitment to Excellence (ACE) Fellowship, UVA
Community
Service
Reviewer: CIKM (2025), COLM (2024, 2025), KDD (2024, 2025), ARR (Dec 2023–), NeurIPS (2023)Volunteer: ACL 2023 (virtual)