Xinjie Shen 沈鑫杰

Xinjie Shen 沈鑫杰

PhD Student @ Georgia Tech

Georgia Institute of Technology

About

I am a Ph.D. student in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech, advised by Prof. Pan Li. My research connects advances in long-horizon agent post-training with safety and privacy. I study how increasingly capable agents can learn from real feedback, infer hidden intent and social context, and act reliably in open-ended real-world environments.

At Qwen, I work on long-horizon agentic post-training and verifiable training environments. My recent work includes VHD-Play, E-Commerce Bench, and research on agent safety and physical-world privacy.

Before Georgia Tech, I worked at Amazon Web Services on efficient sparse retrieval and at Microsoft Research Asia on autonomous R&D agents. I enjoy turning research ideas into systems, benchmarks, and visual explanations that other people can use.

Interests
  • Long-Horizon Agent Post-Training
  • AI Safety and Privacy
  • Verifiable Agent Environments
Education
  • PhD in Machine Learning, 2025 - 2029

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  • BS in Artificial Intelligence, 2021 - 2025

    South China University of Technology

News & Talks

Recent research, releases, and invited talks

  • 2026.09 Released VHD-Play, a Qwen technical report on generating verifiable agentic RL environments from solved mechanisms. I also wrote about how we iterated on its teaser figure.
  • 2026.09 Qwen3.8-Max-Preview reached No. 1 on NVIDIA’s FlashInfer-Bench during our kernel-optimization work. Our longer real-world self-improvement runs exceeded 60 hours and 10,000 tool calls. Read the report.
  • 2026.09 Gave an invited talk at Tsinghua University PI Lab on physical-world privacy awareness in LLMs and VLM agents.
  • 2026.08 Released E-Commerce Bench, a 365-day benchmark for long-horizon autonomous business operation.
  • 2026.08 Gave the Jiangmen / TechBeat talk Distributed Hidden Malice: Attacks and Defenses, connecting CKA-Agent attacks with TurnGate defenses for multi-turn dialogue.
  • 2026.06 How Far Are VLMs from Privacy Awareness in the Physical World? was accepted to NeurIPS 2026. Paper.
  • 2026.05 Released TurnGate, a response-aware defense against hidden malicious intent in multi-turn dialogue. Project.
  • 2026.04 The Trojan Knowledge was accepted to ICML 2026.
    Earlier news

    • 2026.01 Our behavioral study of overreliance on conversational language models was accepted to CHI 2026. Paper.
    • 2026.01 Our physical-world privacy benchmark was accepted to ICLR 2026. Paper | Code and data.
    • 2025.02 Our work on inference-free sparse retrieval was accepted to SIGIR 2025. Paper | Code.
    • 2024.08 We open-sourced RD-Agent for automatic data-centric R&D.
    • 2024.07 I received Microsoft Research Asia’s Star of Tomorrow award.

Writing

Notes on research, agents, and how the work gets made

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Post-Training Research Intern, Long-Horizon Agents
May 2026 – Present
Building agentic RL data and training pipelines for Qwen3.7-Max and Qwen3.8-Max. My work spans verifiable environment generation, long-horizon evaluation, kernel optimization, and real-world self-improvement.
 
 
 
 
 
Ph.D. Student in Machine Learning
August 2025 – Present Atlanta, GA
Advised by Prof. Pan Li. I work on trustworthy agentic intelligence, including distributed-intent attacks and defenses, physical-world privacy, and state-aware tool-use safety.
 
 
 
 
 
Research Intern, Sparse Retrieval
November 2024 – February 2025 Shanghai
Developed an $\ell_0$ sparsification method for inference-free sparse retrievers. The released model series averages 1.8 million downloads per month.
 
 
 
 
 
Research Intern, Autonomous R&D Agents
January 2024 – August 2024 Beijing
Worked with Dr. Jiang Bian on data-centric automatic R&D and helped build RD-Agent. Received the Star of Tomorrow award.

Contact

Research conversations and collaborations are welcome

Email is the best way to reach me.