Shengran Hu

Hello! I am Shengran Hu (胡圣然). I am a PhD student at University of British Columbia, advised by Dr. Jeff Clune. I am currently interning at Sakana AI as a research scientist.
I want to understand the emergence of complexity, such as natural evolution and human scientific discoveries. I study this by building open-ended AI systems that can accumulate complexity in language.
Email / Google Scholar / Github / Twitter
news
Apr 10, 2025 | Introducing The AI Scientist-v2, which produced the 1st fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review at a workshop level! |
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Feb 1, 2025 | We introduce Automated Capability Discovery (ACD). ACD automatically discovers surprising new capabilities and failure modes in foundation models via self-exploration. |
Jan 23, 2025 | Two of our works Automated Design of Agentic Systems and Intelligent Go-Explore were accepted to ICLR 2025. Thank you to my incredible collaborators Cong and Jeff! |
Dec 16, 2024 | Our work Automated Design of Agentic Systems got Outstanding Paper at NeurIPS 2024 OWA Workshop and Oral at LanGame Workshop! |
Aug 19, 2024 | Introducing Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS)! [tweet thread]. |
selected publications
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Automated Design of Agentic SystemsInternational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025🏆 Outstanding Paper (NeurIPS 2024 Open-World Agent Workshop)
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Automated Capability Discovery via Foundation Model Self-ExplorationarXiv preprint arXiv:2502.07577 , 2025
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The AI Scientist-v2: Workshop-Level Automated Scientific Discovery via Agentic Tree SearcharXiv preprint arXiv:2504.08066 , 2025
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Intelligent Go-Explore: Standing on the Shoulders of Giant Foundation ModelsInternational Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
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Thought Cloning: Learning to Think while Acting by Imitating Human ThinkingAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023Spotlight (top 3.1% in 12,343)