About

I work on making autonomous AI agents verifiable — so that every tool call, every dollar, and every reasoning step leaves an audit trail you can trust.

I'm a Master's student in Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California, where I research trustworthy and self-evolving agent systems at the Fortis Lab. My work spans agent safety & governance, retrieval and memory hierarchies for long-horizon reasoning, and sim-to-real reinforcement learning for tool use — with a habit of turning each idea into a shipped, open-source system.

Before USC I studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Along the way I've built recommendation models at JD.com, low-latency trading infrastructure at Optiver, and autonomous GEO/SEO agents at Topify.AI. Outside research I'm building Serica, turning global curiosity about China into real trips.

Education

University of Southern California

M.S. in Computer Engineering, Honors Program · Fortis Lab
2025 – 2027Los Angeles, USA

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

B.Eng. in Electrical & Computer Engineering · Minor in Computer Science
2022 – 2026Shanghai, China

HSFZ · CCNU No.1 High School 华中师大一附中

High School Diploma
2019 – 2022Wuhan, China

Open-Source · Flagship

AEGIS

★ 371

Runtime policy enforcement for AI agents — cryptographic audit trail, human-in-the-loop approvals, and a kill switch. Zero code changes to adopt.

TypeScript 371 ★ · 41 forks GitHub ↗ Site ↗

Sovereign-OS

★ 102

Constitution-first AI orchestration: one YAML Charter defines mission, budget & rules. CEO plans → CFO approves → Ledger tracks every cent & token → Auditor scores. 16 workers, Stripe, MCP.

Python 102 ★ · 12 forks GitHub ↗

Publications

2026 · first-author unless noted. Aojie Yuan highlighted. See Google Scholar for the full list & citations.

AEGIS architecture — Figure 1

AEGIS: No Tool Call Left Unchecked — A Pre-Execution Firewall and Audit Layer for AI Agents

A. Yuan, Z. Su, Y. Zhao

arXiv:2603.12621 ★ Flagship system Cited by 7 arXivdemo
Auditable Agents — figure

Auditable Agents

Y. Nian, A. Yuan, H. Zhang, J. Li, Y. Zhao

KnowFM @ ACL 2026 ACM AI Summit 2026 arXiv:2604.05485 Cited by 9 arXiv
When Simulation Lies: A Sim-to-Real Benc — figure

When Simulation Lies: A Sim-to-Real Benchmark and Domain-Randomized RL Recipe for Tool-Use Agents

X. Zhou, A. Yuan, Z. Luo, Z. Ling, X. Pan, Y. Gao, H. Zhang, J. Li, S. Jiang, et al.

NeurIPS 2026 FAGEN @ ICML 2026 arXiv:2605.11928 Cited by 2 arXiv
SEVA: Self-Evolving Verification Agent w — figure

SEVA: Self-Evolving Verification Agent with Process Reward for Fact Attribution

A. Yuan, Y. Nian, H. Zhang, Z. Su, Y. Zhao

AI4GOOD @ ICML 2026 arXiv:2606.29713 Cited by 1 arXiv
Not All Thoughts Need HBM — architecture

Not All Thoughts Need HBM: Semantics-Aware Memory Hierarchy for LLM Reasoning

A. Yuan, T. Shen, D. Zhang

arXiv:2605.09490 Cited by 1 arXiv
Sovereign-OS — architecture

Sovereign-OS: A Charter-Governed Operating System for Autonomous AI Agents with Verifiable Fiscal Discipline

A. Yuan, H. Zhang, Z. Wang, Y. Zhao

arXiv:2603.14011 ★ 102 on GitHub Cited by 1 arXivcode
Hidden Error Awareness — architecture

Hidden Error Awareness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: The Signal Is Diagnostic, Not Causal

A. Yuan, Z. J. Su, H. Zhang, Y. Nian, Y. Zhao

arXiv:2605.09502 arXiv
10

Do Agent Skills Speak Safety in Every Language? A Cross-Lingual Security Analysis of the Skills Ecosystem

H. Zhang, A. Yuan, Y. Nian, Y. Zhao

Agent Skills @ ACM CAIS 2026

Experience

Topify.AI  Forward Deployed Engineer

Nov 2025 – Jan 2026
  • Designed & deployed an autonomous GEO/SEO agent system (LangGraph, Inngest, Claude API) orchestrating 6 specialized sub-agents — keyword analyst, content strategist, writer, publisher, visibility monitor, strategy optimizer.
  • Built a closed-loop pipeline: the monitor tracks brand share across AI search engines (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini) and feeds visibility deltas back to the optimizer, which dynamically tunes content structure, topic selection & publishing cadence.
  • Cut content-ops headcount by 80% and drove 200% revenue growth to $3M ARR, replacing a 5-person team with a single self-optimizing workflow.
LangGraphInngestClaude APIMulti-agent

JD.com  Recommendation Algorithm Engineer · Beijing

Dec 2024 – Feb 2025
  • Helped build an end-to-end generative recommendation framework (semantic-ID retrieval), unifying candidate generation and ranking into one sequence-to-sequence model replacing the multi-stage cascade.
  • Used NER to mine 18 key attributes from year-long logs; applied Qwen-VL for item visual-text analysis and Aho-Corasick for efficient query matching, strengthening semantic features and improving codebook utilization for ID quantization.
  • Built a multi-view user-behavior module fusing short/long-term interaction sequences via QFormer-based aggregation of hierarchical semantic embeddings from click, order & RSU behaviors.
Generative RecQwen-VLQFormerSemantic ID

Optiver  Algorithm Engineer · Shanghai

Dec 2023 – Feb 2024
  • Developed low-latency components for a volatility-prediction pipeline targeting Chinese commodity futures, supporting automated market-making.
  • Accelerated an LSTM volatility model by porting the engine from Python to C++/LibTorch with custom CUDA kernels; achieved a 70% inference-latency reduction (5 ms → 1.5 ms) via TensorRT quantization & kernel fusion.
  • Built the real-time market-data ingestion module in C++/ZeroMQ to process tick-level order-book data from Chinese futures exchanges.
C++LibTorchCUDATensorRTZeroMQ

Enjoymi Games 欢动科技  Software Engineer · Shanghai

Aug 2023 – Oct 2023
  • Maintained core SDKs for two major mobile games — robust login, payment & platform integration.
  • Engineered custom SDK integrations for major Android channels (e.g. Xiaomi channel package) and architected a unified authentication interface over the HMS Account SDK, exposing a clean login() handling silent/explicit sign-in and all auth states.
AndroidJavaHMSSDK

Currently Building

AEGIS

Product

The runtime safety layer for AI agents — cryptographic audit trail, human-in-the-loop approvals, and a kill switch, adopted with zero code changes. 371★ open-source, live at aegistraces.com.

Sovereign-OS

Product

Charter-governed AI orchestration: a YAML constitution sets mission, budget & rules; CEO plans → CFO approves → Ledger tracks every cent & token → Auditor scores. 16 workers, Stripe, MCP. 102★ open-source.

Founder GitHub ↗

Serica

Startup

A China-inbound travel platform that turns global curiosity about China into real, bookable trips — AI-generated itineraries, cultural adaptation, and a conversion funnel built for overseas travelers.

BrewNet

Startup

An AI agent that makes professional warm introductions — it reasons over your network and goals to broker curated, high-signal intros to the right people, then handles the outreach end to end.

Founder GitHub ↗ In development