Hi there! I am Zekai Shao, a Ph.D candidate in the School of Data Science at Fudan University (FDU), supervised by Prof. Siming Chen and associated with FDU-VIS. I am also a visiting PhD student at the Yonsei University, supervised by Prof. Bongshin Lee in Human-Data Interaction Lab. I received my bachelorโs degree with honor from Intelligent Science and Technology (Honored Class) at FDU in 2023. I also have taken an internship at Microsoft Research Asia, advised by Dr. Yun Wang and Haidong Zhang.
I am a researcher working at the intersection of Visualization, HCI, and AI. My primary research focuses on advancing GenAI-powered visualization generation and evaluation by bridging methodological strengths across these three communities to improve data communication. To build the cross-community foundation for this research direction, I also contribute to related research within each field, including human-subject empirical studies in Visualization, human-AI interaction in HCI, and post-training for large language models in AI.
๐ Publications
From $\boldsymbol{\log\pi}$ to $\boldsymbol{\pi}$: Taming Divergence in Soft Clipping via Bilateral Decoupled Decay of Probability Gradient Weight
Xiaoliang Fu*, Jiaye Lin*, Yangyi Fang*, Chaowen Hu, Cong Qin, Zekai Shao, Binbin Zheng, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng
The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026.
MASPO: Unifying Gradient Utilization, Probability Mass, and Signal Reliability for Robust and Sample-Efficient LLM Reasoning
Xiaoliang Fu*, Jiaye Lin*, Yangyi Fang*, Binbin Zheng, Chaowen Hu, Zekai Shao, Cong Qin, Lu Pan, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026.
ChartInsighter: An Approach for Mitigating Hallucination in Time-series Chart Summary Generation with A Benchmark Dataset
Fen Wang, Bomiao Wang, Xueli Shu, Zhen Liu, Zekai Shao, Chao Liu, and Siming Chen
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. IEEE PacificVisโ25), 2025.
FineโTuned Large Language Model for Visualization System: A Study on SelfโRegulated Learning in Education
Lin Gao, Jing Lu, Zekai Shao, Ziyue Lin, Shengbin Yue, Chokit Ieong, Yi Sun, Rory James Zauner, Zhongyu Wei, Siming Chen
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proc. IEEE VISโ24), 2024.
๐ Experience
Education
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2023.09 - now, School of Data Science, Fudan University (FDU).
Ph.D in Statistics-Machine Learning Track (Elite Ph.D Program of FDU) โโโAdvisor: Siming Chen
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2019.09 - 2023.06, School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University (FDU).
Bachelor in Intelligent Science and Technology (Hornored Class) โโโAdvisor: Siming Chen
Visiting
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2025.11 - now, Yonsei University.
Visiting PhD Student in Human-Data Interaction Lab โโโAdvisor: Bongshin Lee
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2022.11 - 2023.09, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA).
Research Intern in DKI (Data, Knowledge, and Intelligence) Group โโโAdvisor: Yun Wang and Haidong Zhang
๐ Selected Awards
- The Fudan University Dong Scholarship. 2025
- Award of โAnalysis-Driven Interaction Designโ in IEEE VAST Challenge. 2024
- China National Scholarship. 2023
- Outstanding Graduate of FDU. 2023
- Second Price in Doctoral Forum of SDS๏ผFDU. 2022
- Scholarship for Elite Ph.D. Program of FDU. Begin from 2022.
- Outstanding Innovation Award of SIST, FDU. 2022
- National Second Prize in China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CUMCM). 2020
- Outstanding Student Scholarship of FDU. 2020, 2021, 2022
- Outstanding Student and Outstanding League Member of FDU. 2020, 2021, 2022
- First-class Scholarship for Freshmen of FDU. 2019
๐ค Service
- Session Chair: China-R Conference (AI+VIS Session) 2023
- Program Committee: ACM CHI Poster 2026, ACM IUI 2026
- Journal Reviewer: IEEE TVCG, ACM TiiS, Neurocomputing, Visual Informatics
- Conference Reviewer: VIS 2025 (with two โhighly usefulโ notations), CHI 2024-2026 (with three Special Recognitions), IUI 2025-2026, CogSci 2025, C&C 2025 (with one Special Recognition), PacificVis 2024-2026, ChinaVis 2023-2025
- Conference Volunteer: IEEE VIS 2023
- Teaching Assistant: Image Processing and Data Visualization (honored course) 2023 Fall, Approaching Artificial Intelligence 2024 Fall