I am a second-year CS Phd student at University of Southern California (USC), in, where I am very fortunately advised by Willie Neiswanger. I obtained my CS Master's and Bachelor's degree at ShanghaiTech University. My research interests include

• 🦙 GenAI → Reasoning models, mechanistic interpretability, AI4Science
• 🎰 Decision-making → Reinforcement learning

⇒ Contact: upup.ashton.wang at gmail dot com & Google Scholar, Github, X, LinkedIn

Selected Release

Release

Selected Publications

LLM Reasoning

• Shangshang Wang, Julian Asilis, Ömer Faruk Akgül, Enes Burak Bilgin, Ollie Liu, and Willie Neiswanger. Tina: Tiny Reasoning Models via LoRA, 2025. [PDF][Web][Github][HF][X]
• Shangshang Wang, Julian Asilis, Ömer Faruk Akgül, Enes Burak Bilgin, Ollie Liu, Deqing Fu, and Willie Neiswanger. Resa: Transparent Reasoning Models via SAEs, 2025. [PDF][Web][Github][HF][X]

LLMs

• Mostafa Faghih Shojaei*, Rahul Gulati*, Benjamin A. Jasperson*, Shangshang Wang*, Simone Cimolato, Dangli Cao, Willie Neiswanger, and Krishna Garikipati. AI-University: An LLM-based platform for instructional alignment to scientific classrooms, 2025. [PDF]
• Ollie Liu, Sami Jaghouar, Johannes Hagemann, Shangshang Wang, Jason Wiemels, Jeff Kaufman and Willie Neiswanger. METAGENE-1: Metagenomic Foundation Model for Pandemic Monitoring, 2025. [PDF][Web][Github][HF][X]
• Shangshang Wang, Ziyu Shao, and John C.S. Lui. Next-Word Prediction: A Perspective of Energy-Aware Distributed Inference, IEEE TMC, 2023. [PDF]

RL and Bandits

• Shangshang Wang, Simeng Bian, Xin Liu, and Ziyu Shao. Neural Constrained Combinatorial Bandits, IEEE TON, 2025 (previously accepted by IEEE INFOCOM, 2023). [PDF] [Slides]
• Shangshang Wang, Ziyu Shao and Yang Yang. Constrained Dueling Bandits for Edge Intelligence, IEEE TNSE, 2024. [PDF]
• Yongxin Xu, Shangshang Wang, Hengquan Guo, Ziyu Shao, and Xin Liu. Learning to Schedule Online Tasks with Bandit Feedback, AAMAS, 2024. (Oral) [PDF]

Experiences

Working