Ph.D. Student · Capital One Fellow

Zhenyu (Fischer) Lei

E-mail: vjd5zr [at] virginia [dot] edu Address: Charlottesville, VA, USA

About

About me

I am a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia, advised by Prof. Jundong Li. 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.

My research centers on LLM continual learning, with a broad interest in graph and time series. I am open to collaborations and discussions — feel free to reach out via email! Actively looking for intern!

News & notices

News

Sep 2026One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2026 (AdaST).

Aug 2026Two papers accepted at EMNLP 2026 (one Main (MemSuit), one Findings (TeacherGRPO)).

June 2026Honored to recieve Capital One Fellow

Jan 2026One paper accepted at ICLR 2026 (REdit).

Jan 2026One paper accepted at ISBI 2026 (BrainTAP).

Oct 2025One paper accepted at WSDM 2026 (MolEdit).

Publications

Selected Research

All publications →

30papers

11first-author papers

ICLR 2026 Reasoning

Reforming the Mechanism: Editing Reasoning Patterns in LLMs with Circuit Reshaping

Zhenyu Lei, Qiong Wu, Jianxiong Dong, Yinhan He, Emily Dodwell, Yushun Dong, Jundong Li

EMNLP 2026 Memory (oral)

Grounding Memory Summarization in Utility Intent

Zhenyu Lei, Mingjia Shi, Xingbo Fu, Haoyu He, Qi R. Wang, Jundong Li

EMNLP 2025 Distillation

Learning from Diverse Reasoning Paths with Routing and Collaboration

Zhenyu Lei, Zhen Tan, Song Wang, Yaochen Zhu, Zihan Chen, Yushun Dong, Jundong Li

Paper

WSDM 2026 Edit (oral)

MolEdit: Knowledge Editing for Multimodal Molecule Language Models

Zhenyu Lei, Patrick Soga, Yaochen Zhu, Yinhan He, Yushun Dong, Jundong Li

Paper

NeurIPS 2026 Spatial-temporal

AdaST: Adaptive Coupling for Spatial-Temporal Forecasting

Zhenyu Lei, Chenghao Liu, Yushun Dong, Qi R. Wang, Jundong Li

AAAI 2025 ST (oral)

ST-FiT: Inductive Spatial-Temporal Forecasting with Limited Training Data

Zhenyu Lei, Yushun Dong, Jundong Li, Chen Chen

Paper

* 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)