Hi, I'm Haoyu Gu!

I am a senior undergraduate in Artificial Intelligence at South China University of Technology. In 2027, I will join Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School as a master’s student, supervised by Prof. Xiao-Ping Zhang.

My research focuses on generative AI and discrete representations of structured data, with current work centered on symbolic music. I study how tokenization affects generation quality, controllability, and editing, and how the choice of representation units and temporal structure supports autoregressive generation, streaming generation, and explicit editing.

I have collaborated with Lekai Qian on several projects. At SCUT, I work on symbolic music generation under the guidance of Prof. Qi Liu, and on natural language processing under the guidance of Prof. Zhanpeng Jin.

I have also been fortunate to receive guidance from New York University’s Dr. Ziyu Wang on BEAT and Nanjing University’s Assoc. Prof. Shuai Wang on BeatEdit.

I am good at revisiting problems from overlooked angles and getting back to the problem itself to find new research directions.

Selected Publications

ACM MM 2026

BeatEdit: Symbolic Music Generation as Explicit Editing

Haoyu Gu, Lekai Qian, Haowu Zhou, Qi Liu^†, Shuai Wang^†

Generates music by explicitly editing an existing draft, connecting discrete representations with controllable editing methods.

arXiv Code Demo Poster

ICML 2026

BEAT: Tokenizing and Generating Symbolic Music by Uniform Temporal Steps

Lekai Qian, Haoyu Gu, Jingwei Zhao, Ziyu Wang^†

Encodes each pitch within a beat as one token, making the time structure explicit for music continuation and streaming accompaniment.

arXiv Code Demo Poster

ICASSP 2026

Pianoroll-Event: A Novel Score Representation for Symbolic Music

Lekai Qian^*, Haoyu Gu^*, Dehan Li^*, Boyu Cao, Qi Liu^†

Converts a sparse piano-roll into a compact event-token sequence for autoregressive music generation.

arXiv Demo

Other publications (2)

Findings of ACL 2026

Anchored Cyclic Generation: A Novel Paradigm for Long-Sequence Symbolic Music Generation

Boyu Cao^*, Lekai Qian^*, Dehan Li, Haoyu Gu, Mingda Xu, Qi Liu^†

Uses confirmed musical content as anchors to reduce error accumulation in long-sequence generation.

arXiv

Findings of ACL 2026

EmoMM: Benchmarking and Steering MLLM for Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Conflict and Missingness

Yueru Sun^*, Yimeng Zhang^*, Haoyu Gu, Nuo Chen, Dong She, Xianrong Yao, Yang Gao^†, Zhanpeng Jin^†

Studies emotion recognition under conflicting or missing modalities, with inference-time attention steering.

arXiv

Education

2027.09 – 2029.06 (expected)

Tsinghua University

Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School

Incoming Master's StudentData Science

Advisor: Prof. Xiao-Ping Zhang

2023.09 – 2027.06 (expected)

South China University of Technology

School of Future Technology

Undergraduate · Artificial Intelligence

GPA: 3.97/4.0

South China University of Technology emblem

Earlier education

2020.09 – 2023.06

Nanjing Ninghai High School

2017.09 – 2020.07

High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University, Shuren School

2011.09 – 2017.07

Nanjing Langya Road Primary School

Conferences & Life

Oct. 20, 2026 · Nanjing

2026 Physical AI & World Model Conference

Watched the opening ceremony and heard experts discuss research progress, industry developments, and applications of world models and embodied AI

Oct. 18, 2026 · Nanjing

Back on Campus with My Parents

Back on campus with my parents for my mom’s birthday

Sept. 25, 2026 · Godhome

Hollow Knight · Radiant Challenges

Defeated Pure Vessel and Nightmare King Grimm on Radiant difficulty

Sept. 6, 2026 · Guangzhou

2026 Gathering for Students, Teachers and Parents from Jiangsu

Shared advice on university studies and research planning with the 2026 freshman cohort at SCUT’s Guangzhou International Campus

July 22–23, 2026 · Shanghai

AI Future Student Forum

School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

July 12–14, 2026 · Hefei

AI and Data Science Summer Camp

School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China

May 15–16, 2026 · Beijing

Undergraduate Academic Exchange Day

College of AI, Tsinghua University

May 4–8, 2026 · Barcelona

ICASSP 2026

Attending ICASSP 2026

Apr. 10, 2026 · Suzhou

Stefanie Sun in Concert

“After Sunset” tour

July 30–Aug. 12, 2025 · Cambridge, UK

Cambridge Summer Tour

Punting on the River Cam

Honors & Awards

Jun. 2025

Future Technology Taihu Innovation Award

学业创新一等奖

无锡市政府

May 2025

Lanqiao Cup C++ Programming Contest (Group A)

广东省二等奖

工业和信息化部人才交流中心

Nov. 2024

China Mathematics Competition

广东赛区二等奖

中国数学会

Sep. 2024

SCUT Mathematical Contest

一等奖

华南理工大学数学学院

Sep. 2024

China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling

广东省二等奖

中国工业与应用数学学会

Talks & Presentations

Oct. 16, 2026

Graduate Admissions Experience Sharing for the AI Class of 2024

Event School of Future Technology, SCUT

Location SCUT, GZIC, D5-e220

Sharing practical experience in graduate admissions preparation, contacting supervisors, assessments, and applications to different universities and schools.

Sharing Page

Sep. 21, 2025

AI Journey: From Study to Research

Event AI Association Freshman Seminar

Location SCUT, GZIC, F3-a101

As a member of the AI Association Academic Resources Department, I was invited to share insights on academic studies, competitions, research, and essential computational tools for computer science majors.

Slides

Sep. 7, 2025

Academic Planning & Experience Sharing

Event Jiangsu Students Welcome Meeting

Location SCUT, GZIC, F3-a101

Invited as a student representative to share academic insights and planning strategies with the incoming class of 2025 freshmen.

Sep. 1, 2024

University Life Guide for New Students

Event Jiangsu Students Welcome Meeting

Location SCUT, GZIC, F3-b101

Invited as a student representative to welcome and guide the class of 2024 freshmen, sharing insights on university academic life and providing practical guidance for their college journey.