Hi there! I am Ranran Shen (申冉冉), a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). I feel incredibly fortunate to be advised by Prof. Pan Peng, whose guidance has been instrumental in shaping my academic journey. I am a member of the AntBag group. Previously, I got my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Technology from Central South University (CSU) in 2022.
My research interests lie broadly in spectral graph theory, sublinear algorithms and graph algorithms. I am actively exploring new directions within this space. If you’d like to discuss my research or have any questions, please feel free to email me at: ranranshen@mail.ustc.edu.cn. I’m also happy to connect with people both within and beyond academia🔅.
🔥 News
- 2026.01: 🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by ICLR’2026 (main conference) and many thanks to my co-authors!📝
- 2024.04: 🎉🎉 Thrilled to start an internship at
, focusing on GUI agent.💻 - 2023.10: 🎉🎉 I’m honored to receive the National Scholarship!🏆
- 2023.09: 🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by NeurIPS’2023 (main conference)!📝
📝 Publications
Sublinear Spectral Clustering Oracle with Little Memory (ICLR’2026)
Ranran Shen, Xiaoyi Zhu, Pan Peng, Zengfeng Huang
- We study the problem of designing sublinear spectral clustering oracles for well-clusterable graphs. A major limitation of existing oracles is that constructing $\mathcal{D}$ requires $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ memory, which becomes a bottleneck for massive graphs and memory-limited settings. In this paper, we break this barrier and establish a memory-time trade-off for sublinear spectral clustering oracles.
A Sublinear-Time Spectral Clustering Oracle with Improved Preprocessing Time (NeurIPS’2023)
Ranran Shen, Pan Peng
Paper｜Slides: short (5 min), full｜Poster
- We address the problem of designing a sublinear-time spectral clustering oracle for graphs that exhibit strong clusterability. Previous oracles have relied on either a $\textrm{poly}(k)\cdot\log n$ gap between inner and outer conductances or exponential (in $k/\varepsilon$) preprocessing time. Our algorithm relaxes these assumptions, albeit at the cost of a slightly higher misclassification ratio.
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On the Role of Reasoning Patterns in the Generalization Discrepancy of Long Chain-of-Thought Supervised Fine-Tuning. COLM 2026. Zhaoyi Li, Xiangyu Xi, Zhengyu Chen, Wei Wang, Gangwei Jiang, Ranran Shen, Linqi Song, Ying Wei and Defu Lian.
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Every Coin Has Two Sides: On the Dual Nature of Generalization in On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models. Preprint. Zhaoyi Li, Deyang Kong, Yuan Wei, Evan Yang, Ranran Shen, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Ming Yang, Wei Zhang, Chuan Hao, Jian Yang, Ran Tao, Bryan Dai, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye, Ying Wei, Defu Lian.
📖 Education
- 2022.09 ~ present, Ph.D. student, School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei.
- in successive master-doctor program.
- 2018.09 ~ 2022.06, Undergraduate, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University (CSU), Changsha.
💻 Internship
- 2024.04 ~ 2024.08, Tencent , Shenzhen.
🎖 Services
- Invited Reviewer:
- NeurIPS 2026, COCOON 2026, ICML 2026, ICLR 2026.
- Teaching Assistant:
- Spring 2025: Algorithms for Big Data (Undergraduate, USTC). Instructor: Prof. Pan Peng.
- Fall 2023: Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Graduate, USTC). Instructors: Prof. Pan Peng and Prof. Xiaohua Xu.
🏆 Honors and Awards
- 2026.03, ICLR 2026 Travel Grant.
- 2023.10, National Scholarship (Top 2%)🌷.
- 2022 ~ 2025, First Prize, USTC Graduate Student Academic Scholarship.
- 2022.06, Honored as The Outstanding Bachelor Graduate of Hunan Province (Top 3%).
- 2022.06, Honored as The Outstanding Bachelor Graduate of CSU (Top 15%).
- 2021.10, National Scholarship (Undergraduate, Top 2%)🌷.
- 2019 ~ 2021, Honored as The Outstanding Student of School of Computer Science and Engineering, CSU.
- 2020 ~ 2021, First Prize, CSU Undergraduate Student Academic Scholarship.
- 2019.10, Second Prize, CSU Undergraduate Student Academic Scholarship.