Hi there! I’m a Ph.D. candidate in ECE Department at Steves Institute of Technology under the supervison of Prof. K.P (Suba) Subbalakshmi.

Previously, I got the M.S. degree in Multimedia Telecommunication from University of Liverpool, where I was guided by Prof. Qiufeng Wang and Prof.Kaizhu Huang. In here, I embarked my academic path. Before that, I obtained my B.Eng degree in Telecommunication from the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.

My research interest includes Natural Language Processing, Multimodal, Audio/Speech Processing, Trustworthy AI.

If you’re interested at anything or if you are seeking any form of academic cooperation, please feel free to contact me at: caoyupeng.work at gmail dot com.

🔥 News

• 2025.05: 🎉 Two paper InvestorBench (main) and FlagTrader(finding) are headed to ACL 2025
• 2024.11: Service as a Session Chair at ICAIF 2024
• 2024.09: 🎉 One paper was accepted by NeurIPS 2024
• 2024.09: 🎉 One paper was accepted by ICAIF 2024
• 2024.08: 💻 We host Agent-Based Single Cryptocurrenty Trading Challenge @ Coling 2025, Welcome everyone to participate!
• 2022.05: Passed Ph.D. Qualify Exam
• 2022.03: One paper was accepted by Deep Generative Models for Highly Structured Data Workshop @ ICLR 2022
• 2021.06: One paper was accepted by InterSpeech 2021

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2021 - 2025 Provost Doctoral Fellowship
• 2021.5 Outstanding Master Thesis Award
• 2020.8 Stevens ECE 2020 Honours Summer Research Program 3rd Award

📝 Publications

(* means co-first author / equal contributions)

Main Publication

• ACL 2025 INVESTORBENCH: A Benchmark for Financial Decision-Making Tasks with LLM-based Agent
  Haohang Li*, Yupeng Cao*, Yangyang Yu*,…, Zining Zhu, K.P. Subbalakshmi, Jordan W. Suchow.
• ACL 2025 FLAG-TRADER: Fusion LLM-Agent with Gradient-based Reinforcement Learning for Financial Trading
  Guojun Xiong, Zhiyang Deng, Keyi Wang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie.
• NeurIPS 2024 FinCon: A Synthesized LLM Multi-Agent System with Conceptual Verbal Reinforcement for Enhanced Financial Decision Making
  Yangyang Yu*, Zhiyuan Yao*, Haohang Li*, Zhiyang Deng*, Yupeng Cao*, Zhi Chen*, et al.
• ICAIF 2024 ECC Analyzer: Extract Trading Signal from Earnings Conference Calls using Large Language Model for Stock Volatility Prediction
  Yupeng Cao*, Zhi Chen*, Qingyun Pei*, Prashant Kumar, K.P. Subbalakshmi, Papa Momar Ndiaye.
• Pre-print Can Large Language Models Detect Misinformation in Scientific News Reporting?
  Yupeng Cao, et al.
• ICLR-W 2022 Causal-TGAN: Modeling tabular data using causally-aware GAN
  Bingyang Wen, Yupeng Cao, Fan Yang, K.P. Subbalakshmi, R. Chandramouli.
• InterSpeech 2021 Modular multi-modal attention network for Alzheimer’s disease detection using patient audio and language data
  Ning Wang, Yupeng Cao, Shuai Hao, Zongru Shao, and K. Subbalakshmi.
• ICONIP 2019 Improving script identification by integrating text recognition information
  Yupeng Cao*, Jing Li*, Qiufeng Wang, Kaizhu Huang, and Rui Zhang.

Competition and Workshop Paper:

• FinNLP@IJCAI-24 CatMemo@ IJCAI 2024 FinLLM Challenge: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models using Data Fusion in Financial Applications
  Yupeng Cao, Zhiyuan Yao, Zhi Chen, Zhiyang Deng
• BEA 2022 Starting from “zero”: An incremental zero-shot learning approach for assessing peer feedback comments
  Qinjin Jia, Yupeng Cao, Edward F. Gehringer.

Others

• Fed-FIDS: A Efficient Federated Learning-Based Intrusion Detection Framework, MILCOM 2024. (AI + Networking)\ Fan Yang, Yupeng Cao, Bingyang Wen, Cristina Comaniciu, K.P. Subbalakshmi.
• Automated Handling and Feeding Techniques for Skewering Operations, Journal of the ASABE (2024). (AI + Mechanical)
  Jing Yi, Jiaqi Lyu, Wenbo Liu, Tianqi Yao, Yupeng Cao, Yuzhen Lu, and Xin Zhang.
• Cutting techniques in the fish industry: A critical review, Foods 11, no. 20 (2022): 3206. (AI + Mechanical)
  Wenbo Liu, Jiaqi Lyu, Di Wu, Yupeng Cao, Qingquan Ma, Yuzhen Lu, and Xin Zhang.

📖 Educations

• 2021.09 - Now, Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology.
• 2019.09 - 2021.07, M.S. in Applied Artificial Intelligence, Stevens Institute of Technology.
• 2017.09 - 2018.12, M.S. in Multimedia Telecommunication, University of Liverpool.
• 2013.09 - 2017.07, B.Eng in Telecommunication, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.

🧑‍🎨 Professional Service

• Conference Reviewer: KDD (24, 25), ICLR (25), ICML (25), ARR (24, 25), ICAIF (24), ICASSP (25)
• Journal Reviewer: IEEE IoT Journal, TAI, TNNLS, ACM the Web
• PC Member: FinNLP-FNP-LLMFinLegal @ COLING-2025
• Workshop/Challenge Organizer: Agent-based Single Cryptocurrency Trading @ COLING-2025

💻 Skills

• Programmings: Python, C/C++, CUDA, MATLAB, Assembly.
• Frameworks: PyTorch, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Keras, Tensorflow2.x/1.x, Scikit, Caffe.
• Application Skills: Linux, Git, LaTeX, Vim, Shell, AWS, Docker, PySpark.