Chihan Cui

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Ming Liu. I received my B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (St. George Campus), where I was advised by Qizhen Zhang and Phil Bernstein.

My research interests lie in MLSys, efficient ML, and GPU communication. I have contributed to UCCL-EP (portable expert-parallel communication for LLMs), and Sirius (GPU-accelerated SQL engine). I am always open to new ideas and collaborations – feel free to reach out!

news

Jul 15, 2026	Our paper Expert-Choice Routing Enables Adaptive Computation in Diffusion Language Models has been accepted to COLM 2026!
Mar 26, 2026	Our paper UCCL-EP: Portable Expert-Parallel Communication has been accepted to OSDI 2026!
Dec 15, 2025	Sirius achieved #1 on the ClickBench benchmark!
Sep 01, 2025	Joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, advised by Ming Liu.
Apr 07, 2025	Our paper dpBento: Benchmarking DPUs for Data Processing is now available on arXiv.

selected publications

COLM ’26

Expert-Choice Routing Enables Adaptive Computation in Diffusion Language Models

Shuibai Zhang^*, Caspian Zhuang^*, Chihan Cui^*, Zhihan Yang, Fred Zhangzhi Peng, Yanxin Zhang, Haoyue Bai, Zack Jia, Yang Zhou, Guanhua Chen, and Ming Liu

In Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{zhang2026ecdlm,
  title = {Expert-Choice Routing Enables Adaptive Computation in Diffusion Language Models},
  author = {Zhang, Shuibai and Zhuang, Caspian and Cui, Chihan and Yang, Zhihan and Peng, Fred Zhangzhi and Zhang, Yanxin and Bai, Haoyue and Jia, Zack and Zhou, Yang and Chen, Guanhua and Liu, Ming},
  booktitle = {Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01622},
}

OSDI ’26

UCCL-EP: Portable Expert-Parallel Communication

Ziming Mao, Yihan Zhang, Chihan Cui, Kaichao You, Zhongjie Chen, Zhiying Xu, Scott Shenker, Costin Raiciu, Yang Zhou, and Ion Stoica

19th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2026

Bib HTML

@article{mao2025ucclep,
  title = {UCCL-EP: Portable Expert-Parallel Communication},
  author = {Mao, Ziming and Zhang, Yihan and Cui, Chihan and You, Kaichao and Chen, Zhongjie and Xu, Zhiying and Shenker, Scott and Raiciu, Costin and Zhou, Yang and Stoica, Ion},
  journal = {19th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.19849},
}

arXiv

dpBento: Benchmarking DPUs for Data Processing

Jiasheng Hu, Chihan Cui, Anna Li, Raahil Vora, Yuanfan Chen, Philip A. Bernstein, Jialin Li, and Qizhen Zhang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05536, 2025

Bib HTML

@article{hu2025dpbento,
  title = {dpBento: Benchmarking DPUs for Data Processing},
  author = {Hu, Jiasheng and Cui, Chihan and Li, Anna and Vora, Raahil and Chen, Yuanfan and Bernstein, Philip A. and Li, Jialin and Zhang, Qizhen},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.05536},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05536},
}