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 and sublinear algorithms. I am also interested in Post-Training of Large Language Models (LLMs), including Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning and On-Policy Distillation. 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
- 2026.08: 🎉🎉 Thrilled to start an internship at
, focusing on On-Policy-Distillation (OPD).💻 - 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
.💻 - 2023.10: 🎉🎉 I’m honored to receive the National Scholarship!🏆
- 2023.09: 🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by NeurIPS’2023 (main conference)!📝
📝 Publications
Testing for a Large Induced Expander: Sublinear Algorithms and Query Lower Bounds [arXiv]
Pan Peng*, Ranran Shen*.
(*Authors listed alphabetically, following the convention in theoretical computer science.)
Preprint 2026
Sublinear Spectral Clustering Oracle with Little Memory [arXiv] [Poster]
Ranran Shen, Xiaoyi Zhu, Pan Peng, Zengfeng Huang.
ICLR 2026
A Sublinear-Time Spectral Clustering Oracle with Improved Preprocessing Time [arXiv] [Poster] [Slides]
Ranran Shen, Pan Peng.
NeurIPS 2023
On the Role of Reasoning Patterns in the Generalization Discrepancy of Long Chain-of-Thought Supervised Fine-Tuning [arXiv]
Zhaoyi Li, Xiangyu Xi, Zhengyu Chen, Wei Wang, Gangwei Jiang, Ranran Shen, Linqi Song, Ying Wei and Defu Lian.
COLM 2026
Every Coin Has Two Sides: On the Dual Nature of Generalization in On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models [arXiv]
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.
Preprint 2026
📖 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.
💻 Internships
🎖 Services
- Invited Reviewer:
- SODA 2027, 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 ~ 2026, 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.
- 2019 ~ 2021, Second Prize * 1 and First Prize * 2, CSU Undergraduate Student Academic Scholarship.