About Me
Hello! I am a fourth-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 have published over ten papers in leading journals and conferences. 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). 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
- 2026.08: 🎉🎉 My paper “EarthVerse” was published on arXiv. This work was completed during my research assistantship at MIT. Many thanks to Dingyi and Yihong!
- 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 5 papers
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)
✦ Initial Review Score · Top 0.6%
Jiaming Ma†, Zhiqing Cui†, Binwu Wang, Pengkun Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Zhe Zhao, Yang Wang
IJCAI 2025 (Oral)
† Equal contribution
Zhiqing Cui†, Binwu Wang†, Guanjun Wang, Zhengyang Zhou, Fan Meng, Jingjia Luo, Yang Wang
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
† Equal contribution
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)
Breaking through tropical cyclone intensity prediction: a foundation model Prithvi-TC
Zhiqing Cui, Fan Meng, Jingjia Luo
Frontiers of Computer Science
First-Author Preprints 5 papers
EarthVerse: Benchmarking Scientific Agents Across Dynamic Earth Systems and Natural Hazards
Zhiqing Cui, Xinxiang Yin, Yihong Tang, Xinglang Zhang, Yuanzhe Hu, Siru Zhong, Weidong Tang, Yuxuan Liang, Weijia Li, Ming Jin, Shirui Pan, Yuhao Kang, Dingyi Zhuang, Jinhua Zhao
arXiv preprint
SCOPE-Router: Cost-Aware Open-Set VLM Routing for Execution-Oriented Tasks
Tao Yu†, Yifei Qu†, Zhiqing Cui† (Project Leader), Pengfei Zhou, Zhongtian Luo, Yujia Yang, Shenghua Chai, Haopeng Jin, Zhenghao Zhang, Xinming Wang, Hongzhu Yi, Wangbo Zhao, Zhenglin Wan, Yan Huang, Yeshani, Jinwen Luo, Yang You
arXiv preprint
† Equal contribution
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
PaperX: A Unified Framework for Multimodal Academic Presentation Generation with Scholar DAG
Tao Yu†, Minghui Zhang†, Zhiqing Cui† (Project Leader), 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
† Equal contribution
Zhiqing Cui, Siru Zhong, Ming Jin, Shirui Pan, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang
arXiv preprint
Co-Authored Papers 8 papers
Grounding 3D Affordance from Human-Object-Interaction Videos via Multimodal Large Language Model
Hanqing Wang, Mingyu Liu, Xiaoyu Chen, Chengwei Ma, Yiming Zhong, Wenti Yin, Yuhao Liu, Zhiqing Cui, Jiahao Yuan, Lu Dai, Zhiyuan Ma, Hui Xiong
NeurIPS 2026
Hanqing Wang, Zhenhao Zhang, Kaiyang Ji, Mingyu Liu, Wenti Yin, Yuchao Chen, Zhirui Liu, Xiangyu Zeng, Tianxiang Gui, Hangxing Zhang, Jiahao Yuan, Zhiqing Cui, Jiaxin Liu, Zhiyuan Ma, Hui Xiong
ECCV 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
Jiahao Yuan, Zixiang Di, Zhiqing Cui, Guisong Yang, Usman Naseem
ACL 2025 (Main)
Jiahao Yuan, Zhiqing Cui, Hanqing Wang, Yuansheng Gao, Yucheng Zhou, Usman Naseem
WWW 2026
Hanqing Wang, Shaoyang Wang, Yiming Zhong, Zemin Yang, Jiamin Wang, Zhiqing Cui, Jiahao Yuan, Yifan Han, Mingyu Liu, Yuexin Ma
AAAI 2026 (Oral)
Jiahao Yuan, Xingzhe Sun, Xing Yu, Jingwen Wang, Dehui Du, Zhiqing Cui, Zixiang Di
XLLM@ACL 2025 (Shared Task, 3rd Place)
Qingxiang Liu, Zhiqing Cui, Xiaoliang Luo, Yuqian Wu, Zhuoyang Jiang, Huaiyu Wan, Sheng Sun, Lvchun Wang, Wei Yu, Yuxuan Liang
Findings of EMNLP 2026
preprint Papers 1 paper
Omni-DeepSearch: A Benchmark for Audio-Driven Omni-Modal Deep Search
Tao Yu, Yiming Ding, Shenghua Chai, Minghui Zhang, Zhongtian Luo, Xinming Wang, Xinlong Chen, Zhaolu Kang, Junhao Gong, Yuxuan Zhou, Haopeng Jin, Zhiqing Cui, Jiabing Yang, YiFan Zhang, Hongzhu Yi, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang
arXiv preprint
🎖 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) (USD 2,500).
- 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) (approx. USD 800 funding).
- 2026.06: Full Scholarship, ACL Diversity and Inclusion Subsidy (USD 1,800).
- 2026.06: Full Scholarship, KDD-26 Undergraduate Consortium (UC) (USD 1,500).
📖 Research Experiences
🎓 Services
- Journal Reviewer: Neurocomputing; IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS); npj Artificial Intelligence; IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI); IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (TASLPRO)
- Conference Reviewer: Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL); International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI); International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML); Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS); AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI); International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
💻 Internships
