Xinjie Shen 沈鑫杰

Xinjie Shen 沈鑫杰

PhD Student @ Georgia Tech

Georgia Institute of Technology

About

As AI becomes embedded everywhere in everyday life, I study how intelligent systems can act safely, protect privacy, and remain reliable over long horizons. My research spans multi-turn attacks, timely defenses, and state-aware safety for tool-using agents; privacy in physical and interactive environments; and the evaluation and training of long-horizon agents. These directions come together in the research initiative Everywhere Safety.

I am a Ph.D. student in Machine Learning at Georgia Tech, advised by Prof. Pan Li. My work has been shaped by research experiences and collaborations across Georgia Tech, CMU, Qwen, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Research Asia.

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 SEAD, a state-based framework for attack and defense in tool-using agents. Project · Code and data.
  • 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.