👋 About Me

I am Zizhen Li (李子桢), a Ph.D. student at the College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, jointly trained at Shanghai Innovation Institute (SII), advised by Kaipeng Zhang. I began my graduate study at Nankai University in 2022 and transferred to the Ph.D. program in 2024. I received my B.Eng. from Taiyuan University of Technology in 2022.

My research interests lie at Human–AI Co-Creation for Game Design and LLMs for Social and Entertainment Scenarios.

🎲 Off the clock, I play social deduction (Avalon, One Night Werewolf, Blood on the Clocktower), card and tile games (Sheng Ji, Texas Hold'em, Mahjong), and light strategy games (Catan, Codenames, Cabo).

📖 Education

2024.09 – Present

Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University × Shanghai Innovation Institute. Advisor: Kaipeng Zhang.
2022.09 – 2024.06

M.S.–Ph.D. combined program (M.S. years) in Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University. Advisor: Mingzhu Sun.

Research in the Robotic Micro-nano Operation Laboratory (ROMIOL): hand-built a two-photon microscope to provide vision for automated micromanipulation.

OptoelectronicsData AcquisitionMachine VisionAutomatic Control
2018.09 – 2022.06

B.Eng. in Electronic Information Engineering, Taiyuan University of Technology.

Member of the Xiaoming Lab, working on electronic hardware.

SensorsMCU / CLabVIEW

📝 Publications

First-Author Papers

arXiv 2026

AutoBG: A Board Game Design Assistant with Interactive Ideation, Iterative Rulebook Generation, and Individualized Feedback

Zizhen Li^*, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Jianwen Sun, Yukang Feng, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Yifei Huang, Kaipeng Zhang^📧

TL;DR An end-to-end board game design assistant with four modules — guided ideation dialogue, verifier-gated iterative rulebook generation with an LLM critic, and individualized audience feedback simulated from 150 real player profiles.

Human-AI Co-CreationGame DesignLLM Agents

📄 Paper

ACL 2026 (Main, Oral)

MeepleLM: A Virtual Playtester Simulating Diverse Subjective Experiences

Zizhen Li^*, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Yifei Huang, Kaipeng Zhang^📧

TL;DR A virtual playtester trained on 1.7K rulebooks and 150K reviews with MDA-based reasoning, simulating the subjective feedback of diverse player personas; outperforms GPT-5.1 and Gemini3-Pro in community alignment and critique quality.

Virtual PlaytestingPlayer PersonaGame Evaluation

📄 Paper 💻 Code

EMNLP 2025 (Main)

InMind: Evaluating LLMs in Capturing and Applying Individual Human Reasoning Styles

Zizhen Li^*, Chuanhao Li, Yibin Wang, Qi Chen, Diping Song, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Mingzhu Sun, Kaipeng Zhang^📧

TL;DR A benchmark grounded in social-deduction gameplay for evaluating whether LLMs can capture and apply an individual's reasoning style across contexts.

LLM EvaluationSocial Deduction GamesIndividualized Reasoning

📄 Paper 💻 Code

Co-Authored Papers

arXiv 2026AgenticSTS: A Bounded-Memory Testbed for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

Xiangchen Cheng, Yunwei Jiang, Jianwen Sun, Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Xiangcheng Cao, Yihao Liu, Fanrui Zhang, Li Jin, Kaipeng Zhang

ECCV 2026Code-in-the-Loop Forensics: Agentic Tool Use for Image Forgery Detection

Fanrui Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Sizhuo Zhou, Jianwen Sun, Chuanhao Li, Jiaxin Ai, Yukang Feng, Yujie Zhang, Wenjie Li, Zizhen Li, Yifan Chang, Jiawei Liu, Kaipeng Zhang

arXiv 2026JAMER: Project-Level Code Framework Dataset and Benchmark on Professional Game Engines

Jianwen Sun, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Yukang Feng, Fanrui Zhang, Yifei Huang, Yu Dai, Kaipeng Zhang

ICML 2026Closing the Expression Gap in LLM Instructions via Socratic Questioning

Jianwen Sun^*, Yukang Feng^*, Yifan Chang^*, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Yu Dai, Kaipeng Zhang

ACL 2026 FindingsLongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces

Yukang Feng^*, Jianwen Sun^*, Zelai Yang^*, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Yu Qiao, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang

CVPR 2026ProSoftArena: Benchmarking Hierarchical Capabilities of Multimodal Agents in Professional Software Environments

Jiaxin Ai, Yukang Feng, Fanrui Zhang, Jianwen Sun, Zizhen Li, Chuanhao Li, Yifan Chang, Wenxiao Wu, Ruoxi Wang, Mingliang Zhai, Kaipeng Zhang

ICLR 2026A High-Quality Dataset and Reliable Evaluation for Interleaved Image-Text Generation

Yukang Feng^*, Jianwen Sun^*, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Jiaxin Ai, Fanrui Zhang, Sizhuo Zhou, Yifan Chang, Shenglin Zhang, Yu Dai, Kaipeng Zhang

WWW 2026Navigating Truth in Multimodal Fact-checking via Retrieval- and Reasoning-Enhanced Large Language Models

Fanrui Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Jianwen Sun, Chuanhao Li, Jiaxin Ai, Yukang Feng, Zizhen Li, Kaipeng Zhang, Jiawei Liu, Zheng-Jun Zha

arXiv 2026World Craft: Agentic Framework to Create Visualizable Worlds via Text

Jianwen Sun^*, Yukang Feng^*, Kaining Ying^*, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Jiaxin Ai, Yifan Chang, Yu Dai, Yifei Huang, Kaipeng Zhang

AAAI 2026MDK12-Bench: A Multi-Discipline Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Pengfei Zhou^*, Xiaopeng Peng^*, Fanrui Zhang^*, Zhaopan Xu, Jiaxin Ai, Yansheng Qiu, Wangbo Zhao, Jiajun Song, Chuanhao Li, Weidong Tang, Zhen Li, Haoquan Zhang, Zizhen Li, Xiaofeng Mao, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Kai Wang, Xiaojun Chang, Wenqi Shao, Yang You, Kaipeng Zhang

arXiv 2025From Pixels to Paths: A Multi-Agent Framework for Editable Scientific Illustration

Jianwen Sun^*, Fanrui Zhang^*, Yukang Feng^*, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Jiaxin Ai, Yifan Chang, Yu Dai, Kaipeng Zhang

NeurIPS 2025Sekai: A Video Dataset towards World Exploration

Zhen Li^*, Chuanhao Li^*, Xiaofeng Mao, Shaoheng Lin, Ming Li, Shitian Zhao, Zhaopan Xu, Xinyue Li, Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Jiaxin Ai, Zhixiang Wang, Yuwei Wu, Tong He, Yunde Jia, Kaipeng Zhang

ICCV 2025ProJudge: A Multi-Modal Multi-Discipline Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset for MLLM-based Process Judges

Jiaxin Ai, Pengfei Zhou, Zhaopan Xu, Ming Li, Fanrui Zhang, Zizhen Li, Jianwen Sun, Yukang Feng, Baojin Huang, Zhongyuan Wang, Kaipeng Zhang

arXiv 2025ARMOR: Empowering Autoregressive Multimodal Understanding Model with Interleaved Multimodal Generation via Asymmetric Synergy

Jianwen Sun^*, Yukang Feng^*, Chuanhao Li, Fanrui Zhang, Zizhen Li, Jiaxin Ai, Sizhuo Zhou, Yu Dai, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang

💼 Internship

2025.10 – Present, Research Intern, Alaya Lab, Shanghai, China. Advisor: Kaipeng Zhang.

📬 Contact

Reach me by email at lizizhen@mail.nankai.edu.cn, or scan a QR code below.