I work as an Associate Professor at the BIMK Research Group in School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University in China.

I graduated from the School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University with a bachelor’s degree and a doctoral degree. I was also a Visiting Ph.D. student at Bielefeld University , Germany in 2022.

My research interests include automated machine learning, neural architecture search, and evolutionary computation for smart education applications. I have authored/coauthored 50+ peer-reviewed papers, with 30+ papers published in prestigious IEEE Trans. (TNNLS, TEVC, TETCI, etc.) and top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, SIGIR, etc.). My Google Scholar citation information is as . I have received the National Scholarship for Postgraduate (2019), multiple best paper/poster awards at top conferences, and the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (Grade B) of the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation.

📖 Education

• Ph.D.: Sep. 2017 - Dec. 2022, Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University
• Visiting Ph.D.: Mar. 2022 - Sep. 2022, Bielefeld University, Germany
• B.E: Sep. 2013 - Jun. 2017, Network Engineering, Anhui University

💼 Work Experience

• Associate Professor: Apr. 2026 - Present, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University
• Research Assistant: Aug. 2025 - Apr. 2026, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University
• Research Assistant: Jun. 2025 - Jul. 2025, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• Postdoctoral Researcher: Mar. 2023 - May 2025, School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University
• Intern-researcher: Jul. 2021 - Aug. 2021, Tencent Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd

💻 Research Interest

1. Trustworthy Intelligent Education
   • Generalized Cognitive Diagnosis (Fairness)
   • Interpretable Cognitive Diagnosis (Interpretability)
   • Federated Cognitive Diagnosis (Privacy)
   • Robust Cognitive Diagnosis (Robustness)
2. Automated X
   • Neural Architecture Search
   • Automatic Algorithm Design
   • Symbolic Regression
3. Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization for 1️⃣ & 2️⃣

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2025.11 The 2025 Postdoctoral Research Performance Assessment (Tier 2, Top 5%) of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant Number YJB20250190, 60K.
• 2025.06 The First Prize of the IEEE CEC (C04) EMAP Dataset Challenge: Predicting Affective States & Physiological Response with Feature Selection Competition, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.
• 2025.06 The First Prize of the IEEE CEC (C07) Large-Scale Multi-objective Optimisation for Status Assessment of Measuring Equipment Competition, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.
• 2025.06 The Second Runner-Up of the IEEE CEC (C10) Dynamic Optimisation Problems Competition, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.
• 2025.06 The First Prize of the IEEE CEC (C06) Constrained Single and Multi-objective Numerical Optimisation Competition, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.
• 2024.10 The Bronze Award of the 2024 China International College Students’ ‘Internet+’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.
• 2024.9 The Golden Award of the 2024 Anhui College Students’ ‘Internet+’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (GAOJIAO Main Track).
• 2024.07 The Winner of the Competition on “Large-scale Multiobjective Optimization for Status Assessment of Measuring Equipment” at the 2024 IEEE World Conference on Computational Intelligence.
• 2024.05 The Third Prize of the 2024 China College Student Service Outsourcing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.
• 2024.05 The Excellent Postgraduate Tutor Team of Anhui Province: Institute of Bioinspired Intelligence and Mining Knowledge Postgraduate Tutor Team.
• 2023.9 The Best Paper of the 2023 International Conference on Data-driven Optimization of Complex Systems (DOCS 2023): the paper entitled “Evolutionary Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search for Generalized Cognitive Diagnosis Models”.
• 2023.6 The Winner of the Competition on “Large-scale Continuous Optimization for Non-contact Measurement - MO Optimization” at the 2023 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.
• 2022.12 The Best Poster Paper of the 2022 Annual Conference of Anhui Artificial Intelligence Society: the paper entitled “Accelerating Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search via Multifidelity Evaluation”.
• 2022.06 The Silver Award of the 2022 Anhui College Students’ ‘Internet+’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (GAOJIAO Main Track).
• 2019 The National Scholarship for Postgraduate, Awarded by the Ministry of Education, China.
• 2014 The National Encouragement Scholarship, Awarded by Anhui Provincial Education Department.

📜 Patents

• S. Yang, L. Qin, X. Yu, H. Ma, and Y. Tian. “A Knowledge Tracing Method Based on Transformer Neural Architecture Search,” No. CN202410388534X.
• S. Yang, M. Chen, X. Yu, H. Ma, and Y. Tian. “A Neural Architecture Search Method Based on Multi-Objectives,” No. CN2024104100144.
• Y. Tian, Z. Shi, S. Yang, and X. Zhang. “An Image Recognition Method Based on A Gradient-Guided Evolutionary Algorithm,” No. ZL202111639517.1.
• X. Zhang, J. Li, S. Yang, X. Yu, and H. Ma. “A Cognitive Diagnosis Method for Heterogeneous Graph Learning Based on Imbalance Perception,” No. CN120144950A.
• M. Cao, H. Ma, S. Yang, and X. Zhang. “Distance-Aware Knowledge Tracing,” No. CN117933301A.

• 🎙 Invited Talks

• 2023.09, NICE Seminar: Designing Novel Cognitive Diagnosis Models by Evolutionary Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search

  Arxiv Paper

  Accepted Paper

  Video

💬 Fundings

• China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2025 Postdoctoral Research Performance Assessment, Tier 2, No. YJB20250190), 2025-2026, 60K.

• The Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (Grade B) of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant Number GZB20240002 (A two-year support started in 2024, only 1000 people won, and about 500 people won Grade A)， 360K ；

• The China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (74th Batch of General Funding)，2023-2025 (at a funding rate of about 17% ) 80K；

• The National Natural Science Foundation of China (Youth Project)，2024-2026, 300K；

• Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Applications (No. AFZNJS2024KF01)，2024-2025, 50K；

🧑‍🎨 Reviewers

• Journals: IEEE TPAMI, IJCV, TNNLS, JAS, TEVC, TETCI, TCSS, TOIS, TAI, TSNE
• Conferences: IJCAI, SIGIR, SIGKDD, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, ACM MM, AAAI, WWW

🔥 News

• 2026.05:  🎉🎉 Our work “Beyond Item Selection: Rethinking Ability Evolution in Computerized Adaptive Testing” has been accepted by KDD 2026 (Research Track).
• 2026.03:  🎉🎉 Our work “Large Language Model-assisted Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search for Cognitive Diagnosis” has been accepted by IEEE TETCI.
• 2025.11:  🎉🎉 Our work “PEOAT: Personalization-Guided Evolutionary Question Assembly for One-Shot Adaptive Testing” has been accepted by AAAI 2026 (Research Track). [Paper]
• 2025.11:  🎉🎉 Our work “Debiased Cognitive Diagnosis: A Contrastive Counterfactual Modeling Method via Variational Autoencoder” has been accepted by AAAI 2026 (Oral) Paper.
• 2025.11:  🎉🎉 I received the 2025 Postdoctoral Research Performance Assessment (Tier 2) of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant Number YJB20250190.
• 2025.04:  🎉🎉 Our work on “Endowing Interpretability for Neural Cognitive Diagnosis by Efficient Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks” has been accepted by IJCAI 2025.
• 2024.09.26:  🎉🎉 Our work DisenGCD proposing a meta-multigraph-assisted graph learning framework for cognitive diagnosis has been accepted by NeurIPS 2024.
• 2024.09.01:  🎉🎉 Our group won the Golden Award of the 2022 Anhui College Students’ ‘Internet+’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (GAOJIAO Main Track), supervised by Ye Tian and Xingyi Zhang.
• 2024.07.07:  🎉🎉 Our work (EMO-NAS-CD) on using NAS for cognitive diagnosis has been accepted by IEEE TEVC.
• 2024.07.01:  🎉🎉 I received the support of Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (Grade B) from China China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, only 500 people won Grade A and 1,000 people got the Grade B.

📝 Publications

• KDD 2026 “Beyond Item Selection: Rethinking Ability Evolution in Computerized Adaptive Testing”. X. Yu, J. Li, Shangshang Yang*, Z. Wang, H. Ma, and X. Zhang, ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (CCF A), 2026.

TETCI 2026

“Large Language Model-assisted Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search for Cognitive Diagnosis”

Shangshang Yang, Linrui Qin, Xiaoshan Yu, Ziwen Wang, Ye Tian*, Xueming Yan, Haiping Ma, Xingyi Zhang

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 2026

Project

• The source code of the proposed LLM-NAS-CD approach, integrating large language models with evolutionary neural architecture search for cognitive diagnosis.

• KDD 2026 “Breaking Robustness Barriers in Cognitive Diagnosis: A One-Shot Neural Architecture Search Perspective”. Z. Wang, Shangshang Yang*, X. Yu, H. Ma, and X. Zhang, ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (CCF A), 2026.
• AAAI 2026 “PEOAT: Personalization-Guided Evolutionary Question Assembly for One-Shot Adaptive Testing”. Xiaoshan Yu, Ziwei Huang, Shangshang Yang*, Ziwen Wang, Haiping Ma, Xingyi Zhang, in the Proceedings of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CCF A), 2026.
• AAAI 2026 “Debiased Cognitive Diagnosis: A Contrastive Counterfactual Modeling Method via Variational Autoencoder”. Shangshang Yang, Xuewen Duan, Xiaoshan Yu, Ziwen Wang, Haiping Ma, Xingyi Zhang, in the Proceedings of the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CCF A), 2026. [Oral]
• IJCAI 2025 “Endowing Interpretability for Neural Cognitive Diagnosis by Efficient Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks”. Shangshang Yang, Linrui Qin, Xiaoshan Yu, Ziwen Wang, Xueming Yan, Haiping Ma, Ye Tian, in the Proceedings of the 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CCF A), 2025.
• KDD 2025 “Learning Patterns-Guided Data Generation for Knowledge Tracing”. H. Ma, Y. Yin, Z. Wang, C. Wang, X. Yu, Shangshang Yang*, and X. Zhang, ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2025: 2031-2041 (CCF A).
• SIGIR 2025 “Reconciling Efficiency and Effectiveness of Exercise Retrieval: An Uncertainty Reduction Hashing Approach for Computerized Adaptive Testing”. H. Ma, Y. Zhou, X. Yu, C. Wang, Shangshang Yang*, L. Zhang, and X. Zhang, ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2025: 1044-1054 (CCF A).
• SIGIR 2025 “Enhancing Learning Path Recommendation via Knowledge Topology-Aware Sequence Optimization”. X. Yu, Shangshang Yang*, Z. Wang, S. Song, H. Ma, Z. Cao, and X. Zhang, ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2025: 306-315 (CCF A).
• AAAI 2024 “Enhancing Cognitive Diagnosis using Un-interacted Exercises: A Collaboration-aware Mixed Sampling Approach”. Haiping Ma, Changqian Wang, Hengshu Zhu, Shangshang Yang*, Xiaoming Zhang, and Xingyi Zhang*, in the Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CCF A), 2024.
• NeurIPS 2024 “DisenGCD: A Meta Multigraph-assisted Disentangled Graph Learning Framework for Cognitive Diagnosis”. Shangshang Yang, Mingyang Chen, Ziwen Wang, Xiaoshan Yu, Panpan Zhang, Haiping Ma*, and Xingyi Zhang, in the Proceedings of the Thirty-eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (CCF A), 2024.
• TETCI 2024 “Hybrid Architecture-based Evolutionary Robust Neural Architecture Search”. Shangshang Yang, Xiangkun Sun, Ke Xu, Yuanchao Liu, Ye Tian*, and Xingyi Zhang*, IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 2024.

TEVC 2024

“An Evolutionary Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search Approach to Advancing Cognitive Diagnosis in Intelligent Education”

Shangshang Yang, Haiping Ma, Ying Bi, Ye Tian, Limiao Zhang*, Yaochu Jin, and Xingyi Zhang*

IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 2024

Project

• The source code of the proposed EMO-NAS-CD approach, providing found models and the search approach to search for what you need models.

DOCS 2024 Best Paper

“Evolutionary Multi-Objective Neural Architecture Search for Generalized Cognitive Diagnosis Models”

Shangshang Yang, Cheng Zhen, Ye Tian, Haiping Ma*, Yuanchao Liu, Panpan Zhang, and Xingyi Zhang*

2023 International Conference on Data-driven Optimization of Complex Systems

Best Paper

• ICCV 2023 “EQ-Net: Elastic Quantization Neural Networks”. Ke Xu, Lei Han, Ye Tian, Shangshang Yang*, and Xingyi Zhang, in the Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Computer Vision (CCF A), 2023.
• NeurIPS 2023 “Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search for Transformer in Knowledge Tracing”. Shangshang Yang, Xiaoshan Yu, Ye Tian, Xueming Yan, Haiping Ma*, and Xingyi Zhang*, in the Proceedings of the Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (CCF A), 2023.
• TETCI 2023 “Cognitive Diagnosis-Based Personalized Exercise Group Assembly via a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm”. Shangshang Yang, Haoyu Wei, Haiping Ma*, Ye Tian, Xingyi Zhang, Yunbo Cao, and Yaochu Jin. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 2023, 7(3):829-844.
• TCDS 2022 “Accelerating Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search via Multi-Fidelity Evaluation”. Shangshang Yang, Ye Tian, Xiaoshu Xiang*, Shicheng Peng, and Xingyi Zhang*. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 2022, 14(4): 1778-1792. Best Poster Paper
• TNNLS 2021 “A Gradient-Guided Evolutionary Approach to Training Deep Neural Networks”. Shangshang Yang, Ye Tian*, Cheng He, Xingyi Zhang*, Kan Chen Tan, and Yaochu Jin. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2021, 33(9): 4861-4875.
• EAAI 2019 “An indexed set representation based multi-objective evolutionary approach for mining diversified top-k high utility patterns”. Lei Zhang, Shangshang Yang, Xinpeng Wu, Fan Cheng*, Ying Xie, Zhiting Lin. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2019, 77: 9-20.
• TETCI 2019 “A Surrogate-Assisted Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm for Large-Scale Task-Oriented Pattern Mining”. Ye Tian, Shangshang Yang, Lei Zhang, Fuchen Duan, Xingyi Zhang*. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 2019, 3(2): 106-116.
• TFS 2019 “An Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization Based Fuzzy Method for Overlapping Community Detection”. Ye Tian, Shangshang Yang, Xingyi Zhang*. IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, 2019, 28(11): 2841-2855.

The last three work was completed during the first-two years of my PhD period, and more co-authored work can be found in my Google Scholar.