Welcome to my homepage! I am Zishuo Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow in NUS, advised by Jiaheng Zhang. I received my PhD degree in UIUC, advised by Professor Yuan Zhou.

From Fall 2023 to Summer 2024, I visited MIT under the supervision of David Simchi-Levi. I defended my PhD thesis in Jan 2026. [Thesis Link]

I will join HKUST(GZ) as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2026, and am recruiting PhD students and RAs. See more details in Chinese [here].

For prospective applicants: The research of mechanism design for blockchain and decentralized AI is [highly challenging]. It requires advanced theoretical background. It is [X for AI] rather than [AI for X] so LLM won’t help you, and you need theoretical knowledge to help LLM instead.

Research Statement

I currently do research on Mechanism Design, and my research interest spans the fields in (the intersection of) Operations Research, EconCS and Trustworthy AI.

I have a special interest in mechanism design for blockchain and decentralized AI, focusing on the design and theoretical boundaries of incentive-secure decentralized trustworthy AI platforms.

• How to incentivize selfish blockchain users to behave honestly, even if they may potentially collude with each other?

• Is it possible to utilize the blockchain to ensure the credibility of AI models, assuming agents are economically rational?

• Could we possibly develop a theoretically reliable decentralized AI platform with minimal overheads?

My research has won two Best Paper Awards at NeurIPS Workshop on Decentralization and Trustworthy ML in Web3 and the 31st Annual LIDS Student Conference at MIT. My work has also been published at the top-tier journal Operations Research.

Research

Bayesian Mechanism Design for Blockchain Transaction Fee Allocation [Link] Xi Chen*, David Simchi-Levi*, Zishuo Zhao*, Yuan Zhou* (Alphabetical)
Operations Research, 73(4), 1944-1964, 2025.
Best Paper Award, NeurIPS Workshop on Web3, 2022
It Takes Two: A Peer-Prediction Solution for Blockchain Verifier's Dilemma [Arxiv] Zishuo Zhao, Xi Chen, Yuan Zhou
Major Revision in Operations Research (2026).
Proof-of-Learning with Incentive Security [Arxiv] Zishuo Zhao, Zhixuan Fang, Xuechao Wang, et al.
EC Workshop on Foundation Models and Game Theory, 2024 / In submission (2025)
Multi-agent Adaptive Mechanism Design [Arxiv] Qiushi Han*, David Simchi-Levi*, Renfei Tan*, Zishuo Zhao* (Alphabetical)
Best Paper Award, 31st Annual LIDS Student Conference at MIT, 2026.
VeriLLM: A Lightweight Framework for Publicly Verifiable Decentralized Inference [Arxiv] Ke Wang*, Zishuo Zhao*, Xinyuan Song, et al. (Equal contribution)
Personalized Pricing with Group Fairness Constraint Xin Chen*, Zexing Xu*, Zishuo Zhao*, Yuan Zhou* (Alphabetical)
ACM FAccT, 2023
Dynamic Car Dispatching and Pricing: Revenue and Fairness for Ridesharing Platforms Zishuo Zhao, Xi Chen, Xuefeng Zhang, Yuan Zhou
IJCAI 2022, Long Oral (top 3.75%)
ClusterSLAM: A SLAM Backend for Simultaneous Rigid Body Clustering and Motion Estimation [Link] Jiahui Huang, Sheng Yang, Zishuo Zhao, Yukun Lai, Shi-Min Hu
CVMJ 2021 / ICCV 2019

Working Projects

T’AIMER: Trustworthy AI Model pEer veRification mechanism (ETA: 1~3 years)

Competitions & Life

Competitions: THUCTF2020 (12th), 24th & 20th THU AI Programming Contest (12th & 15th).

Extracurricular: Beside math and CS, I enjoy photography, singing, and writing. I also developed interests in orienteering, gardening, and sketching during college.

Miscellaneous: I use both they/them and he/him pronouns. I personally identify as agender, though I'm fine with being officially recognized as male.