About Me

Hello! I am a third-year undergraduate student (2023-2027) pursuing a dual degree program at the University of Reading and Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, majoring in Data Science. I am seeking PhD positions for 2027 Fall and warmly welcome any remote/onsite industrial or research internship. Please feel free to contact me via email at zhiqing@nuist.edu.cn or dh803755@student.reading.ac.uk.

🚀 Research Aim

My research interests lie at the intersection of AI for Earth Science (AI4Earth), spatiotemporal data mining, and the reasoning, scheduling, and memory capabilities of LLM agents. I am dedicated to applying these techniques, along with multimodal reasoning, to large-scale real-world scenarios like air pollution management, ultimately aiming to deepen our understanding of the Earth’s environment.

🔍 Research Topics

Over the past year, I worked on spatiotemporal data mining with Assistant Professor Binwu Wang at USTC, resulting in multiple publications. Following this, I was a visiting intern at HKUST(GZ) under Assistant Professor Yuxuan Liang, focusing on causal data relationships and deploying large-model reasoning in real-world settings. Driven by my interest in LLM agent reasoning, I have also collaborated with Jiahao Yuan (ECNU) and Assistant Professor Wentao Zhang (PKU) to develop automated research agents. Currently, I am an intern at Texas AM University working with Professor Yu Zhang in LLM Agents. Furthermore, I am honored to participate in a summer research program at MIT, supervised by Professor Jinhua Zhao and Dingyi Zhuang.

🔥 News

2026.06: 🏆🏆 Received full funding from the KDD Undergraduate Consortium and Travel Grant. See you on the beautiful Jeju Island. Thanks to KDD!
2026.06: 🏆🏆 Received full funding from the Association for Computational Linguistics in recognition of exceptional contributions and accomplishments. Thanks to ACL!
2026.05: 🎉🎉 My paper “Uno-Orchestra” was published on arXiv. This work marks my initial exploration into multi-agent reinforcement learning and routing orchestration.
2026.04: 🎉🎉 My paper “MADGCN” was accepted by IEEE TKDE, initiated during my freshman year. Thanks to Bin!
2026.04: 🎉🎉 My paper “Augur: Modeling Covariate Causal Associations in Time Series via Large Language Models” was accepted main conference on ACL.
2026.02: 🎉🎉 Our paper “PaperX” was published on arXiv. We introduce the first unified framework for academic presentation. I am honored to lead this work. Thanks to Tao and other friends!
2026.01: 🎉🎉 My led paper “OminiAir” was published on arXiv, the best air quality dataset and model in the world.
2025.11: 🏆🏆 Received full funding from the AAAI Undergraduate Consortium, the scholarship for best UG AI researchers. Thanks to AAAI!
2025.06: 🎉🎉 My led work “Draw with Thought” was accepted by ACM MM, and I delivered the oral presentation.
2025.04: 🎉🎉 My first top-tier conference paper “CauAir” was accepted as an oral presentation at IJCAI. I was responsible for compiling the large-scale dataset LargeAQ and delivering the oral presentation. Thanks to Binwu and Jiaming for their contributions.
2025.03: 🎉🎉 My work on foundation models for tropical cyclones was accepted by Frontiers of Computer Science. Presented at EGU, AGU, and other meteorology conferences, and received recognition from NASA.
2025.02: 🏆🏆 Won the 3rd place in the ACL LLMSR@ XLLM25 competition. Thanks to Jiahao for the collaboration.
2024.06: 🏆🏆 Received the First-Class Scholarship from Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST).

📝 Publications

First-Author Accepted Papers

ACL 2026

Augur: Modeling Covariate Causal Associations in Time Series via Large Language Models

Zhiqing Cui, Binwu Wang, Qingxiang Liu, Yeqiang Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Yuxuan Liang, Yang Wang

ACL 2026 (Main)

IJCAI 2025

Causal Learning Meet Covariates: Empowering Lightweight and Effective Nationwide Air Quality Forecasting

Jiaming Ma†, Zhiqing Cui†, Binwu Wang, Pengkun Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Zhe Zhao, Yang Wang

IJCAI 2025 (Oral)

IEEE TKDE

MADGCN: A Meteorology-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolution Network for Long-term Air Pollution Forecasting

Zhiqing Cui†, Binwu Wang†, Guanjun Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Fan Meng, Jingjia Luo, Yang Wang

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)

ACM MM 2025

Draw with Thought: Unleashing Multimodal Reasoning for Scientific Diagram Generation

Zhiqing Cui, Jiahao Yuan, Hanqing Wang, Yanshu Li, Chenxu Du, Zhenglong Ding

ACM MM 2025 (Oral)

Frontiers of Computer Science

Breaking through tropical cyclone intensity prediction: a foundation model Prithvi-TC

Zhiqing Cui, Fan Meng, Jingjia Luo

Frontiers of Computer Science

First-Author Preprints

arXiv

Uno-Orchestra: Parsimonious Agent Routing via Selective Delegation

Zhiqing Cui, Haotong Xie, Jiahao Yuan, Cheng Yang, Hanqing Wang, Yuxin Wu, Yifan Wu, Siru Zhong, Tao Yu, Yifu Guo, Siyu Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Qibing Ren, Usman Naseem

arXiv

PaperX: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Academic Presentation Generation with Scholar DAG

Tao Yu†, Minghui Zhang†, Zhiqing Cui†, Hao Wang, Zhongtian Luo, Shenghua Chai, Junhao Gong, Yuzhao Peng, Yuxuan Zhou, Yujia Yang, Zhenghao Zhang, Haopeng Jin, Xinming Wang, Yufei Xiong, Jiabing Yang, Jiahao Yuan, Hanqing Wang, Hongzhu Yi, YiFan Zhang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang

arXiv preprint

arXiv

Breaking the Regional Barrier: Inductive Semantic Topology Learning for Worldwide Air Quality Forecasting

Zhiqing Cui, Siru Zhong, Ming Jin, Shirui Pan, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang

arXiv preprint

Co-Authored Papers

ICML 2026

DropoutTS: Sample-Adaptive Dropout for Robust Time Series Forecasting

Siru Zhong, Yiqiu Liu, Zhiqing Cui, Zezhi Shao, Fei Wang, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang

ICML 2026

ACL 2025

ReflectDiffu: Reflect between Emotion-intent Contagion and Mimicry for Empathetic Response Generation via a RL-Diffusion Framework

Jiahao Yuan, Zixiang Di, Zhiqing Cui, Guisong Yang, Usman Naseem

ACL 2025 (Main)

WWW 2026

Kardia-R1: Unleashing LLMs to Reason toward Understanding and Empathy for Emotional Support via Rubric-as-Judge Reinforcement Learning

Jiahao Yuan, Zhiqing Cui, Hanqing Wang, Yuansheng Gao, Yucheng Zhou, Usman Naseem

WWW 2026

AAAI 2026

Affordance-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Affordance Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Model

Hanqing Wang, Shaoyang Wang, Yiming Zhong, Zemin Yang, Jiamin Wang, Zhiqing Cui, Jiahao Yuan, Yifan Han, Mingyu Liu, Yuexin Ma

AAAI 2026 (Oral)

preprint Papers

arXiv

Rationale-Grounded In-Context Learning for Time Series Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models

Qingxiang Liu, Zhiqing Cui, Xiaoliang Luo, Yuqian Wu, Zhuoyang Jiang, Huaiyu Wan, Sheng Sun, Lvchun Wang, Wei Yu, Yuxuan Liang

🎖 Honors and Awards

2024.06: First-Class Scholarship, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology (NUIST).
2024.09: First Prize, National Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (Jiangsu Province).
2025.04: 3rd Place, ACL LLMSR@ XLLM25 Competition.
2025.08: Second Prize (National Level), China Graduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (participated independently as an undergraduate).
2025.10: Full Scholarship, AAAI-26 Undergraduate Consortium (UC).
2025.12: Third Prize (National Level), Global Campus AI Algorithm Elite Competition - Smart Meteorology Challenge.
2026.03: Excellent Conclusion (National Level), National Undergraduate Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program project on AI for Science (AI4S).
2026.06: Full Scholarship, ACL Diversity and Inclusion Subsidy.
2026.06: Full Scholarship, KDD-26 Undergraduate Consortium (UC).

📖 Research Experiences

2023 - 2024, Institute of Climate and Application Frontier Research (ICAR), Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology. Mentor: Jingjia Luo.
2024 - 2025, Data Intelligence Laboratory, University of Science and Technology of China. Mentors: Binwu Wang, Yang Wang.
2025 - 2025, TrustAGI Lab, Griffith University. Mentors: Ming Jin, Shirui Pan.
2025 - 2026, CityMind Lab, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology(Guang Zhou). Mentor: Yuxuan Liang.
2026 - 2026, PKU-DCAI (Data-Centric AI) Research Group, Peking University. Mentor: Wentao Zhang.
2026 - 2026, SKY Lab, Texas AM University. Mentor: Yu Zhang.
2026 - 2026, JTL Transit Lab, UrbanAI Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mentors: Jinhua Zhao, Dingyi Zhuang.