CV
Education
- The University of Hong Kong (exchange student), Jan 2026 – May 2026
- University of Science and Technology of China (School of the Gifted Young), Aug 2024 – Jun 2028
- The Second Affiliated Middle School of East China Normal University, Sep 2022 – Jun 2024
Scores and Personal Skills
- GPA: 4.13/4.3 (Ranking: 1/46)
- Native in Mandarin; Fluent in English (TOEFL overall grade 104/120, Jun 26, 2024; CET-4 grade 652/710, Dec 14, 2024; CET-6 grade 663/710, Aug 16, 2025)
- Skilled in Python, C, C++ and Physics
Awards and Achievements
- China National Scholarship (top 1%, highest scholarship from Ministry of Education of China), 2025
- Fung Scholarship (awarded by The University of Hong Kong (HKU), funded by the Victor and William Fung Foundation), 2026
- Outstanding Intern at China Telecom Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, 2024
- Conference paper titled “An Integrated Simulated Annealing Algorithm for WiFi-based Indoor Positioning” accepted by the 30th International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2024)
- Competition Award at the 30th International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2024)
- Outstanding Correspondent, awarded by the Youth League Committee of the University of Science and Technology of China, September 2024
- Outstanding Student Scholarship Bronze Award, December 2024
- Second Prize in the USTC CUPT (Chinese Undergraduate Physics Tournament) Competition, June 2025
Research Experience
PPRBench: A Process-level Benchmark for LLMs’ Physical Reasoning
University of Science and Technology of China, Lab for Data Science
- Designed PPRBench, a contamination-free benchmark for evaluating physical reasoning in large language models.
- Developed PhysGrader, a rubric-guided LLM-as-a-judge framework for process-level reasoning evaluation.
- Explored GRPO on PPRBench, with process reward generated by PhysGrader.
- Evaluated 16 frontier LLMs and analyzed reasoning fidelity in physics tasks.
- Paper submitted to SIGIR 2026 (Resource Track).
An Integrated Simulated Annealing Algorithm for WiFi-based Indoor Positioning
- Proposed a simulated-annealing-based optimization framework for Time-of-Flight (ToF) indoor localization using Channel State Information (CSI).
- Combined triangulation and the MUSIC algorithm for transmitter localization and developed a two-stage error mitigation pipeline including data cleaning and nonlinear optimization.
- Demonstrated improved positioning accuracy and robustness compared with traditional optimization methods such as L-BFGS.
Fingerprint Reasoner: Theoretical Analysis of Raman Spectroscopy and Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Organic Compound Identification with Large Language Models
- February 2025 – May 2025: Participated in the Quantum Optics and Nonlinear Optics Laboratory led by Doctoral Supervisor Zhiyuan Zhou, part of Academician Guangcan Guo’s team at USTC, exploring areas related to Raman spectroscopy and AI for Science.
- Proposed Fingerprint Reasoner, a method that combines LLMs with knowledge retrieval and Chain-of-Thought reasoning.
- Conducted extensive experiments on the QM9S dataset, demonstrating that our method achieves high accuracy.
- Provided a theoretical analysis of Raman spectroscopy, and reproduced optical apparatus to obtain spectral data as well as extracted the features of different categories of data, which supports the design of the method.
- This work provides a new perspective for the application of LLM in the field of spectroscopy, and also enlightens the prospect for on-site and real-time identification of organic compounds.
Publications
PPRBench: A Process-level Benchmark for LLMs’ Physical Reasoning. Denghong Luan, Wentao Shi, Wenjie Wang, Xiangnan He. Submitted to SIGIR 2026 (Resource Track), under review.
An Integrated Simulated Annealing Algorithm for WiFi-based Indoor Positioning. Denghong Luan, Yiheng Zhang, Chen Bin. Accepted at the 30th International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON 2024).
Activities
Admission to the University of Hong Kong as an Exchange Student, Jan 2026 – May 2026
- Course Enrollment (19 weeks)
Fung Scholar, Feb 2026 – Present
- Recipients of the Fung Scholarships by the Victor and William Fung Foundation are known as Fung Scholars.
Intern at China Telecom Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (Shanghai), Jun 2024 – Sep 2024
- Internship Project: Developed a low-cost and easily deployable wearable AI smart glasses system, focusing on system design and prototype implementation.
USTC Student Orchestra — Clarinetist, Sep 2025 – Present
- Member of the University of Science and Technology of China Student Orchestra, performing regular rehearsals and concerts as a clarinet player.