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I publish papers as Zhuoyuan Hao and use Larry Hao professionally; both names refer to the same person.

Finished my CS degree at HITSZ in three years (2023–2026), now an MPhil student at HKUST. I study the mechanisms behind LLM reasoning: why models reason the way they do, and how RL post-training quietly breaks them. Outside research I contribute upstream a lot: 87 merged PRs across 17 repositories, plus code co-authored with maintainers.

Echo of Prompt · first author, ICLR 2026. Reasoning models almost always restate the question to themselves before they start reasoning. Everyone filed this under "SFT artifact." It's more than that: the echo re-anchors attention and keeps a long chain of thought from drifting, and models pay for it when it's missing. I show the probabilistic cost, trace the information flow, and turn the effect into a prompt-time trick that beats baseline under a fixed token budget. → evidence page · code · OpenReview

Reward Hacking in Rubric-based RL (CHERRL) · co-first author. When an LLM judge hands out the reward, the policy can learn to exploit the judge's blind spots instead of actually improving. We built a controllable sandbox: inject a known bias, reproduce the hack cleanly, and pin down the exact step it starts. Then an agent reads the training logs and flags that onset on its own. → project summary · code · arXiv

I'd rather fix the tool than work around it, and then send the fix upstream.

• Tencent CodeBuddy (Research Intern, 2026): mid-training data work for Tencent's coding assistant: data-mixing strategies for code usage data, quality rubrics, and knowledge distillation into 8B models.
• Tencent IEG (Research Intern, 2025): built an agentic SRE assistant and the fault-injection and tool-invocation framework it runs in; the model was open-sourced to ModelScope via CAICT.
• Date-Match: co-founder and algorithm lead. A questionnaire-based matching app; 100K+ questionnaires in the first 10 days, 170K+ in a month, all organic.

LLM reasoning, RL, agents: happy to talk, happier to build. hzy2210@gmail.com