Reliable Agentic AI
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Long-Horizon Agents:
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Benchmarks & Evaluation:
Jie-Jing Shao 邵杰晶
Ph.D., Postdoctoral Researcher, A*STAR CFAR, Singapore
I am a postdoctoral researcher at A*STAR CFAR, as part of the Agentic AI pillar.
I finished my Ph.D. at Nanjing University, advised by Prof. Yu-Feng Li, and was a member of LAMDA Group, led by Prof. Zhi-Hua Zhou.
Research
My long-term goal is to build general and robust AI agents that advance artificial general intelligence (AGI), enhance societal productivity, and improve human well-being. My current research focuses on improving the reliability and robustness of agentic systems, supporting scalable deployment and long-term autonomy.
Neuro-Symbolic Learning
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Neuro-Symbolic Agents:
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Theoretical Foundations:
Robust & Data-Efficient Learning
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Active Learning:
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Data Augmentation:
News
- 2026.09: NesyProact, a neuro-symbolic agentic method, is accepted to NeurIPS 2026 🎉!
- 2026.09: I have been selected as an Area Chair for ICLR 2027!
- 2026.08: FormalImG benchmark is accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026 🎉!
- 2026.08: Give a talk at TechBeat: Neuro-Symbolic Agents: Why Do We Still Need Symbols in the Era of Large Language Models? (in Chinese)
- 2026.06: My PhD dissertation was selected as an Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation by the School of Computer Science, Nanjing University (only 5 in 2026).
- 2026.06: The website for our TPC @ IJCAI 2026 has launched. Welcome to participate!
- 2026.06: Our review of the IJCAI 2025 Travel Planning Challenge is accepted by FCS 🎉!
- 2026.05.20: I completed my PhD defense. Congratulations to myself! What a perfect coincidence to defend on Nanjing University's anniversary day 🎓.
- 2026.05: 2 papers are accepted by KDD 2026 🎉!
- 2026.05: 4 papers are accepted by ICML 2026 🎉! See you in Seoul 🇰🇷!
- 2026.04: Our proposal for the Second Travel Planning Challenge is accepted by IJCAI 2026!
- 2026.01: ChinaTravel is accepted by ICLR 2026 🎉! Many thanks to all co-authors!
- 2025.11: Our Neuro-Symbolic AI survey is highlighted by Nature News!
- 2025.10: We win the Most Innovative Approach Award at NeurIPS 2025 Embodied Agents Challenge 🏆!
Work Experience
- 2026.08 - Present · Postdoctoral Researcher
A*STAR Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR), SingaporeAgentic AI pillar
Education Experience
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2019.09 - 2026.06, Ph.D., School of Computer Science, Nanjing University.
- Advisor: Professor Yu-Feng Li (LAMDA Group).
- 2025.08 - 2026.04, Visiting Student, A*STAR CFAR, advised by Dr. Haiyan Yin, Dr. Xingrui Yu, Dr. Yueming Lyu, and Prof. Ivor Tsang (IEEE Fellow).
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2015.09 - 2019.06, B.E., College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University.
- Tang Aoqing Honors Program in Science (Top ~0.5% at matriculation)
Publications
Featured Projects
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Travel Planning Agents
A comprehensive ecosystem to advance language agents for real-world travel planning:
- Benchmark: Developed ChinaTravel (ICLR'26), the first benchmark for evaluating compositional language instructions, supporting both Chinese and English. [Poster] [Video] [Codebase] [Dataset] [Leaderboard]
- Challenge Organization: Organized international challenges at IJCAI 2026, IJCAI 2025, and AIC 2025 to promote agent research, with a FCS review paper summarizing the IJCAI 2025 challenge.
- Evaluation & Analysis: Systematically evaluated the large language models (Mind the Gap) for agentic travel planning, awarded Best Student Paper at AAAI'26 Workshop.
- Applications/Demonstrations: The 6th Global Campus Artificial Intelligence Algorithm Elite Competition, Third Prize in National Finals & Second Prize of Jiangsu Province, 2024; National "AI+" Industry Application Innovation Competition, Excellence Award, 2024.
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NeurIPS 2025 Challenge on Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents. 2025.10-2025.12
Most Innovative Approach Award -
AAMAS 2023 Imperfect-information Card Games Competition. 2023.6
Top 8 Finalists -
Multi-Task Learning for Recommendation. 2022.11
Spark Award by Huawei, Reported by department.
Awards & Honors
- Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation, School of Computer Science, Nanjing University, 2026.06.
- Best Student Paper Award, AAAI 2026 Workshop on Trustworthy Agentic AI, 2026.
- Most Innovative Approach Award, NeurIPS 2025 Challenge on Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents, 2025.
- Huawei Scholarship, Nanjing University, 2025.
- Best Paper Award, Robust Machine Learning in Open Environments Workshop@PAKDD 2024.
- Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province, Jiangsu Province, 2024.
- Tencent Scholarship, Nanjing University, 2022.
- Outstanding Graduate Students, Nanjing University, 2021.
- National Scholarship, 2021.
- LAMDA Elite Award, Runner-up, 2021.
- Tang Aoqing Honors Program of Research and Practice Award, First Prize, Jilin University, 2016.6.
- ACM-ICPC Asia Regional Contest, 2 Gold Medals, Shenyang, 2015.10 & Dalian, 2016.10.
- CCPC Regional Contest, Gold Medal (4th place), Changchun, 2016.9.
- CCPC Northeast Collegiate Programming Contest, Gold Medal (2nd place), Changchun, 2016.9.
- CCPC Jilin Province Collegiate Programming Contest, 2 Championships, Changchun, 2015.9 & 2016.9.
Academic Service
- Area Chair: ICLR 2027.
- Senior Program Committee: IJCAI 2025.
- Reviewer for Conferences: ICML 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 (Gold Reviewers); NeurIPS 2023, 2024, 2025; ICLR 2024, 2025, 2026; KDD 2024, 2025 (Excellent Reviewers), 2026; AAAI 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026; IJCAI 2024, 2025, 2026; CVPR 2026; ECCV 2026; ECAI 2023; ACML 2021, 2022.
- Reviewer for Journals: Machine Learning; Neural Networks; Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research; IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence; ACM TIST.
- Lead Organizer: IJCAI 2026 Competition: Travel Planning Challenge; IJCAI 2025 Competition: Travel Planning Challenge.
Presentations
- Invited Talk, TechBeat: Neuro-Symbolic Agents: Why Do We Still Need Symbols in the Era of Large Language Models? (in Chinese) [Slides, Video].
- Oral Presentation, KDD 2024 [Slides].
- Oral Presentation, OpenML Workshop@PAKDD 2024 [Slides].
- Invited Presentation, Causality Seminar [Slides].
- Invited Presentation, IJCAI-YES 2023 [Slides].
- Poster Spotlight Session, "机器学习及其应用" (MLA) 2021.
Mentorship
I am deeply grateful to these students for the opportunity to learn, grow, and explore research together.
Swipe or scroll horizontally to compare all columns.
| Student | Research & papers | With me | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xiao-Wen Yang |
Neuro-Symbolic
MLJ × 1
AAAI × 1
ICML × 1
ICLR × 1
|
Undergraduate @ NJU | Ph.D. @ NJU (with Prof. Yu-Feng Li.) |
| Hao-Sen Shi |
RL
KDD × 1
|
Master’s @ NJU | Algorithm Engineer @ Tencent |
| Haoran Hao |
Neuro-Symbolic
RL
KDD × 1
|
Undergraduate @ NJU | Master’s @ CMU |
| Bo-Wen Zhang |
Agentic AI
Neuro-Symbolic
ICLR × 1
|
Undergraduate @ NJU | Ph.D. @ NJU (with Dr. Lan-Zhe Guo.) |
| Chen-Xi Zhang |
RL
Neuro-Symbolic
|
Master’s @ NJU | Algorithm Engineer @ Bilibili |
| Hong-Jie You |
Neuro-Symbolic
LLM
IJCAI × 1
ICML × 1
Findings of EMNLP × 1
|
Master’s @ NJU | Research Intern @ RedTech |
Photography
View all photographsI love taking photos and sharing little moments from my life.