Zucan Lyu (吕祖灿)

Undergraduate Student

School of Computer Science and Technology
University of Science and Technology of China

Email: zucanlv [at] gmail.com

Biography

Hi! I am a senior undergraduate student majoring in computer science @USTC(University of Science and Technology of China).

My research interests lie in Data Synthesis, Agents and Multimodal Intelligence.

In USTC, I explored my research interests under the supervision of Prof. Defu Lian , and I worked closely with Xu Huang and Jianlyu Chen.

I am currently a research intern at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, advised by Prof. Junjie Hu, and I work closely with Binwei Yao.

Feel free to contact me by email if you are interested in discussing with me.

Projects († Equal Contribution; * Corresponding Author)

SYNTRA overview: few-shot-guided self-improvement constructs task-specific retrieval training data

Self-improving data synthesis enables scalable adaptation of embedding models (SYNTRA)

Zucan Lyu^†, Rui Tang^†, Jianlyu Chen^†, Peisheng Jin, Defu Lian^*

Nature Machine Intelligence Under review · arXiv

VisionValueBench examples across six cultural value dimensions

Whose Values Are Generated? Measuring Visual Value Leakage in Multilingual Text-to-Image Generation (VisionValueBench)

Zucan Lyu^†, Binwei Yao^†, Rheeya Uppaal, Jing Yao^*, Xiaoyuan Yi^*, Junjie Hu^*

AgentSpec: Understanding Embodied Agent Scaffolds Through Controlled Composition

Jixuan Chen, Jianzhi Shen, Haoqiang Kang, Zhi Hong, …, Lianhui Qin

Core contributor (not listed as an author): Designed and implemented the memory component of the AgentSpec framework and conducted the experiments reported in the paper’s main results table.

Honors & Awards

[09/2026] National Scholarship (Top 1% at USTC, the highest honor for undergraduates in China)

[09/2026] 2026 Scholarship for the Hua Xia Talent Program in Computer Science and Technology

[10/2025] National Scholarship (Top 1% at USTC, the highest honor for undergraduates in China)

[09/2025] 2025 Scholarship for the Hua Xia Talent Program in Computer Science and Technology

[10/2024] 2024 USTC Outstanding Student Scholarship - Gold Award (Top 10% at USTC)

[09/2024] 2024 Scholarship for the Hua Xia Talent Program in Computer Science and Technology

[09/2023] 2023 USTC Outstanding Freshman Scholarship

Blogs

[11/2025] A small survey about MLE Agent(Machine Learning Engineering Agent)

[10/2025] Detailed Reading: AI-Researcher(In Chinese)

Education & Research Experience

University of Science and Technology of China

Sep. 2023 – Present

B.E. in Computer Science

Advisor: Prof. Defu Lian

Mentors: Xu Huang and Jianlyu Chen

National Scholarship (twice)
Top 1%

University of Wisconsin–Madison

May 2026 – Present

Research Intern, PUMA Lab

Advisor: Prof. Junjie Hu

Mentor: Binwei Yao

University of California San Diego

Feb. 2026 – May 2026

Research Intern

Advisor: Prof. Lianhui Qin

Mentor: Jixuan Chen

Showing University of Science and Technology of China, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of California San Diego.