About
(i), I am an associate professor of data science at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
(ii) Pior to (i), I was an assistant professor of data science at LSE.
(iii) Prior to (ii), I was a Ph.D. student in Statistics at North Carolina State University (NCSU). I work with Dr. Wenbin Lu and Dr. Rui Song.
(iv) Prior to (iii), I obtained a B.S. in Statistics from Zhejiang University in July 2014.
(v) Prior to (iv), I graduated from Ningbo Xiaoshi High School in July 2010.
I was honoured to receive the Peter Gavin Hall Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) Early Career Prize, IMS Tweedie Award and the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) Research Prize.
I am looking for students interested in LLMs, reinforcement learning (see my lecture slides) and statistics.
My email c.shi7@lse.ac.uk. My GitHub.
News
- Jan 2026:
- Our proposal Lowering the Computational Barrier: Resource- and Energy-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning has been awarded!
- Two papers on LLM and A/B testing accepted to ICLR.
- Talks on Stats-powered AI at Renmin University, ECNU and Sanya Workshop on Causality and ML.
- Dec 2025:
- Our proposal Developing Reinforcement Learning Methods for Building Reliable Interventional Digital Health Systems has been awarded!
- One paper on RL accepted to JASA, the other to Brain.
- Oct/Nov: Talks on Stats-powered AI at UCL, University of Birmingham, Manchester, PolyU and Yunnan University.
- Sep/Oct 2025: Two of my AOS papers on RL were selected to present @ NeurIPS 2025. Four papers accepted to TMLR, JASA and STAT. Congratulations to all co-authors!
- Sep 2025: Four papers on LLM and RL accepted to NeurIPS 2025. Congratulations to all co-authors!
- August 2025: Talk @ BIRS on RL.
- August 2025: Talk @ JSM and NKU on Doubly Robust LLM Fine-Tuning.
- July 2025: RL short course at Renmin University, Soochow University, and Capital Normal University (Slides).
- July 2025: Talk @ Tsinghua Statistics + AI Frontier Summit, JCSDS, SHUFE, ECNU, SDUFE.
- June 29, 2025: Talk @ ICSA, Zhuhai, China.
- June 21, 2025: Hongyi will present our work on LLM detection @ 狗熊会
- May 2025: Four papers accepted to ICML 2025. Congratulations to all co-authors! Talk @ Warwick
- April 2025: Honored to receive the Peter Gavin Hall IMS Early Career Prize.
Research
My research is motivated from the following applications:
- LLMs:
- Fine-tuning: DRPO (slides, talk); VRPO (talk); Dual active learning
- Passive detection: AdadetectGPT (talk); L2D
- Ridesharing (see our AAAI tutorial (Youtube, Bilibili) and my talk; see also some simulated environments for Order Dispatch and Spatio-temporal Policy Evaluation);
- Video-sharing (see our KDD paper successfully deployed in a widely used mobile app with millions of daily active users)
- Mobile health (some simulated environments for Diabetes and Intern Health);
- Neuroscience (see our paper on using RL for modelling human decision making).
Some of my recent talks and slides on AI, RL, statistical inference, causal inference and experimental design:
- Stats-powered AI Youtube, Bilibili;
- StatRL Bilibili, Youtube; Chinese versions: Bilibili, Youtube; slides; the accompanying paper and its Chinese version
- CausalRL Youtube, slides; the accompanying paper
- ARMAdesign 2-hour slides, 1-hour slides, 30-minute slides; the accompanying paper
- OPE my slides and our review paper.
A summary of my past research: Statistical Methods in Reinforcement Learning (partly supported by EPSRC)
Editorial Service
- Associate editor, Statistical Learning and Data Science (from Nov 2025)
- Associate editor, Annals of Applied Statistics (from Feb 2025)
- Associate editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association, A&CS (from Sep 2024)
- Associate editor, Journal of the American Statistical Association, T&M (from Aug 2023)
- Associate editor, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B (Jan 2022 – Dec 2025)
- Associate editor, Journal of Nonparametric Statistics (Jan 2022 – present)