Zhiguang Cao

Dr. Zhiguang Cao is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS), Singapore Management University (SMU). With a PhD from Nanyang Technological University (2017), his work bridges Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Combinatorial Optimization to tackle complex logistics and urban mobility challenges.

• Research Advisor to PhD/Master's students: XIAO Xiangjie, YI Hang, ZHANG Ni
• Recipient of the World’s Top 2% Scientist recognition (2024), IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics Outstanding Paper Award (2022), and Nobert Wiener Review Award (2022)
• Completed degrees: PhD (NTU), MSc (NTU), BEng (GDUT, China)

Research Interests focus on Learning to Optimize (L2Opt) and Neural Combinatorial Optimization, with applications in:

• Vehicle Routing Problems (TSP, CVRP, PDP)
• Job Shop Scheduling and Multimodal Optimization
• UAV Routing, Drone Delivery, and Stochastic Programming

His 15 most recent publications (2024-2025) span top venues like NeurIPS, ICML, IJCAI, and IEEE Transactions journals, covering topics from multi-task vehicle routing to graph domain adaptation and learning with large language models.

Scientific Awards:

• World’s Top 2% Scientist (Stanford, 2024)
• IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics Outstanding Paper (2022)
• Nobert Wiener Review Award (2022)
• BMW Summer School Excellent Research Work (2014)
• IEEE Singapore Chapter Tennis Prize (2012)

Dr. Cao advises the L2Opt Research Group, which recruits PhD students and remote interns. He has served as Area Chair for ICLR, SIGKDD, ICML, and Senior PC for AAAI and IJCAI. His ongoing projects include Trustworthy Human-AI Optimization (AISG, 2025-2027) and Mobile Crowdsourcing Emergency Supplies (SMU-UofT, 2025-2026).