Bo Peng (彭博)

I teach AI to ask why, not just what.

I’m a third-year PhD student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, working at the intersection of causal reasoning and large language models. I am co-supervised by Prof. Yu Qiao and Dr. Chaochao Lu, with affiliations at both SJTU and Shanghai AI Lab.

My research pursues a single thread: equipping AI systems with the ability to reason about cause and effect, not just pattern-match on correlations. This spans:

• Causal Evaluation — benchmarking whether LLMs/VLMs truly understand causal relationships (CELLO, CaLM)
• Causal Discovery — scaling neural methods to discover causal structures from data (CauScale, CauScientist)
• Personalization & Generation — building models that adapt to users and generate conditioned on causal structure (IP-Dialog, ConditionVideo)

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to collaborate or just chat about causality and AI.

News

• [May 2026] CauScale accepted to ICML 2026!
• [Sep 2025] IP-Dialog accepted to EMNLP 2025 Findings.
• [Dec 2023] ConditionVideo accepted to AAAI 2024.

Publications

CauScientist: Teaching LLMs to Respect Data for Causal Discovery
Bo Peng, Sirui Chen, lei Xu, Chaochao Lu
arXiv preprint, 2026 · Paper · Code

CauScale: Neural Causal Discovery at Scale
Bo Peng, Sirui Chen, Jiaguo Tian, Yu Qiao, Chaochao Lu
ICML 2026 · Paper · Code

CauSight: Learning to Supersense for Visual Causal Discovery
Yize Zhang*, Meiqi Chen*, Sirui Chen*, Bo Peng*, Yanxi Zhang, Tianyu Li, Chaochao Lu
arXiv preprint, 2025 · Paper

IP-Dialog: Evaluating Implicit Personalization in Dialogue Systems with Synthetic Data
Bo Peng*, Zhiheng Wang*, Heyang Gong, Chaochao Lu
EMNLP Findings, 2025 · Paper · ACL Anthology

Causal Evaluation of Language Models (CaLM)
Sirui Chen*, Bo Peng*, Meiqi Chen, Ruiqi Wang, Mengying Xu, Xingyu Zeng, Rui Zhao, Shengjie Zhao, Yu Qiao, Chaochao Lu
arXiv preprint, 2024 · Project Page

CELLO: Causal Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models
Meiqi Chen, Bo Peng, Yan Zhang, Chaochao Lu
EMNLP, 2024 · Paper

ConditionVideo: Training-Free Condition-Guided Text-to-Video Generation
Bo Peng, Xinyuan Chen*, Yaohui Wang, Chaochao Lu, Yu Qiao
AAAI, 2024 · Project Page

Education

• Ph.D., Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2023 – 2028 (expected)
• B.S., Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2019 – 2023