Tianhao Cheng (程天豪)

I am a first-year PhD student at Fudan University, supervised by Yinghui Xu, Zenglin Xu and Yu Cheng. My past industry intern experiences includes working on a series of pre-training projects like Step3.5-Flash, Step3, OpenCoder and INF-34B.

It's fun to seek the principles underlying the dark magic.

Feel free to contact me through email :-)

Email  /  Scholar  /  Github  /  Zhihu

profile photo
Research (* indicates equal contribution)
OpenCoder
Step3 & Step3.5-Flash

StepFun FoundationModel Team.

Step's next generation Foundation Model.
ModelCard / Github / Huggingface / Zhihu

OpenCoder
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models

Siming Huang*, Tianhao Cheng*, Jason Klein Liu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, J. Yang, J.H. Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Ge Zhang, Zili Wang, Yuan Qi, Yinghui Xu, Wei Chu
ACL2025, ORAL
Home Page / TechReport / Github / Huggingface / Zhihu

INF34B
INF-34B: INF’s Open-Source Large Language Models

Jiaran Hao, Zili Wang, Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, LiuYihan Song, Ansheng You, Zhipeng Zhou, Xiaoyu Tan, Dakuan Lu, Xiaoming Shi, Chao Qu, Haozhe Wang, Yinghui Xu, Wei Chu, Yuan Qi
INF Website
Paper / Github / Huggingface

Professional Experiences
Qwen logo Qwen: PostTrain Intern
May 2026 - Present
Foudation Model Research Intern

I'm exploring agent harnesses and black-box reinforcement learning.
tag2text StepFun: Pretrain Intern
Dec 2024 - Sep 2025
Foudation Model Research Intern

As part of pre-training team, I mainly focus on code ability. Due to certain structural factors, Step3's code ability did not achieve the expected results, sadly😿

I met innovative peers, motivated to improve my sense, chasing fundamental issues in LLM.
Focus on what matters, and let go of the rest.
tag2text INFTech: Pretrain Intern
Jun 2024 - Nov 2024
Research Intern at FoundationModel Team, supervised by Zili Wang and Jiaran Hao.

I'm core author for OpenCoder and main contributor for INF-34B
FunFact: I met my current Ph.D. advisor while completing this internship🦁
tag2text YiVal: Design & Implementation
July 2023 - Jun 2024
Core Developer for yival (2.5k+ star), 1w+ lines code contribute
YiVal is a framework designed for prompt engineering especially in auto-prompting.

During my frontend internship, I found prompt engineering too tedious, so I decided to automate prompt design | evol | evaluate. YiVal was my first entrepreneurial venture, but I finally quit due to some ideological differences.
tag2text ByteDance: LLM Inference Engineer Intern
Feb 2023 - Jun 2023
I developed LAB's first LLM inference serving framework based on FasterTransformer.

Recognizing the potential of LLMs, I shifted my research focus before beginning my master's.

tag2text ByteDance: Life-Service Backend Engineer Intern
May 2022 - Dec 2022
Develop Tiktok Anchor Recommendation Framework, supervised by Rico Eric

My greatest achievement is learning how to solve problems independently. I was happy to find myself growing into a reliable engineer.
Educational Experiences
tag2text Fudan University
Sep 2025 - Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science

Member of AI3-Xu Lab, supervised by Yinghui Xu and Zenglin Xu.
tag2text Fudan University
Sep 2023 - June 2025
Master in Computer Science

Member of CMIT, supervised by Prof. Rui Feng.
tag2text Shanghai University
Sep 2019 - July 2023
B.S. in Computer Science
GPA: 3.91/4.00, ranking: 1/163

Member of SHU ACM Training Team, Leader of Well-Prepared Team
These are my golden hours
Selected Awards
  • First Prize Scholarship, Fudan University 2023
  • Scholarship of Huawei Intelligent Center Program 2022
  • Outstanding Graduates of Shanghai 2023
  • 🥈Silver Medal of CCSP 2021
  • 🥈Silver Medal of ACM-CCPC Guangzhou Station 2021
  • 🥉Bronze Medal of ACM-ICPC Shenyang Station, 2021
  • 🥈Second Prize of China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling, 2021
  • Outstanding Academic Scholarship, Shanghai University 2019 & 2020 & 2021
  • Outstanding Student, Shanghai University 2019 & 2020