Welcome to Defu Cao’s Homepage
Defu Cao /dəfu: tsaʊ/ is a Ph.D. candidate in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, working with Prof. Yan Liu at the USC Melady Lab. He is also working with Prof. Angela Zhou from USC Marshall Data Sciences and Operations.
He has been fortunate to work as a visiting scholar with Prof. Yisong Yue at the California Institute of Technology (2025), focusing on multimodal foundation models, and Prof. Kun Zhang at MBZUAI (2023), focusing on causal inference and time series analysis.
Prior, he earned his Master’s Degree at the School of EECS Peking University, where he was co-advised by Prof. Xu Cheng and Prof. Xianhua Liu.
Cao’s research primarily focuses on developing advanced machine learning and data mining algorithms for structured data, with a particular emphasis on time series foundation models. His work aims to create models that demonstrate a deep understanding of temporal patterns and dynamics in various domains, including spatio-temporal and relational data. To this end, his research aims to integrate causal inference, graph neural networks, spectral domain representation, interpretability, and robustness.
In addition, he is also interested in causal representation learning and pre-training large language models. He has published his research in top conference proceedings including NeurIPS, ICML,ICLR, CVPR, ICRA, and NAACL, etc.
Research Highlights
- 🏆 #1 on Salesforce GIFT-Eval Leaderboard - TSOrchestra achieves top ranking on MASE & CRPS metrics (Dec 2025)
- 📚 3,000+ Citations across 20+ publications in top-tier AI/ML conferences
- 🎓 Student Success - Mentored 6+ students → Duke PhD, UC Berkeley RA, TikTok MLE positions
- 🎤 Invited Speaker - 15+ talks at leading institutions including Caltech, Rice, UBC, UCSD (2024-2025)
- 🏅 Best RA Award 2024 - Selected as Best Research Assistant in USC CS Department (1 per department)
Recent News (2025-2026)
- 01/2026: One paper on Human Involved Agentic Systems accepted by ICLR!
- 01/2026: One paper on Physics Informed Diffusion Foundation Model accepted by ICLR!
- 01/2026: One paper on Offline RL accepted by AISTATS!
- 01/2026: Invited talk “Frontiers of Physics-Informed Time Series Foundation Models.” Host: Peking University, School of AI for Science.
- 01/2026: Invited talk “TSFoundation: From Foundation Models to Agents Orchestration.” Host: DataDog AI Research Lab.
- 12/2025: 🚀 TSOrchestra, our agentic-guided foundation model forecasting framework from USC Melady Lab, reached Rank #1 on the Salesforce GIFT-Eval leaderboard (MASE & CRPS)!
- 10/2025: Invited talk on Advancing Time Series Analysis with Unified Foundation Models at Rice University - CS Department!
- 10/2025: Invited talk on Advancing Time Series Analysis with Unified Foundation Models at Prairie View A&M University - Center of Excellence in Research and Education for Big Military Data Intelligence!
- 09/2025: Invited talk on Time Series Foundation Models at Caltech - Academia-Industry X!
- 07/2025: Invited talk on Time Series Foundation Models at UCSD & Abel.AI!
- 03/2025: Invited talk on New Frontiers in Time Series Foundation Models at University of British Columbia!
Past Achievements (click to expand)
- 10/2024: Invited talk on Time Series Foundation Model in QuantLLM Community!
- 10/2024: Invited talk on Time Series Foundation Model in Lehigh University!
- 09/2024: Invited talk on Time Series Foundation Model in Emory University!
- 09/2024: One paper on Simulator Calibration with Google Research accepted by NeurIPS!
- 06/2024: Started summer internship at Cubist as a Quantitative Researcher in Foundation Models!
- 04/2024: Time Series Foundation Model - TEMPO (ICLR 2024) published on Github and Hugging Face!
- 04/2024: Selected for the 2024 Best Research Assistant Award in USC CS Department! (1 per department)
- 03/2024: Awarded a Graduate School Endowed Fellowship for the academic year!
01/2024: One paper accepted by WWW and two papers accepted by ICLR!
- 12/2023: One paper on multi-modal time series foundation model accepted by AAAI Mentored Undergraduate Research Program!
- 10/2023: One paper on Financial Time-Series Forecasting accepted by ICAIF as Oral paper!
- 06/2023: Joined MBZUAI as a visiting scholar, working with Prof. Kun Zhang!
06/2023: Invited talk at Google Sustainable Urban Mobility: Simulation and Optimization Workshop! Video Slides - 02/2023: One paper on Representation Learning accepted by CVPR!
- 01/2023: One paper on Neural Operator accepted by ICLR!
- 12/2022: One paper on Time-Series Forecasting accepted by SDM!
- 11/2022: One paper on Causal Inference accepted by AAAI!
- 10/2022: One paper on Out-of-distribution benchmark accepted by NeurIPS DistShift!
- 09/2022: One paper on Causal Inference accepted by NeurIPS!
- 07/2022: One paper on Causal Inference accepted by ICML Continuous time workshop!
- 05/2022: One paper accepted by IEEE ICCCAS!
- 04/2022: One paper accepted by NAACL main conference!
- 03/2022: Published the pre-print survey paper of ‘Physics-Informed Machine Learning’!
- 02/2022: Accepted the Research Scientist Intern offer at Adobe Research!
- 01/2022: One paper accepted by PAKDD!
- 11/2021: Organized ICAIF 2021 workshop - Time Series in Finance!
Internships & Research Experience
- Summer 2025: Visiting Scholar at California Institute of Technology, working with Prof. Yisong Yue
- Summer 2024: Quantitative Researcher in Foundation Models at Cubist Systematic Strategies
- Summer 2023: Research Assistant at MBZUAI, working with Prof. Kun Zhang and Prof. Biwei Huang on causality
- Summer 2022: Research Intern at Adobe Research, mentored by Dr. Zhaowen Wang
- Previous: Research Intern at Microsoft Research Lab Asia (MSRA) (twice), working with Dr. Yujing Wang and Alibaba Damo Academy’s Data Analytics and Intelligence Lab, advised by Dr. Jingren Zhou
- First Internship: Baidu, 7 years ago
Awards
- 2025, 1st Place on GIFT-EVAL Leaderboard, Salesforce
- 2024, Best Poster Award, USC
- 2024, Best Research Assistant Award, USC (1 per department)
- 2024, Endowed Fellowship, USC
- 2021, Annenberg Fellowship, USC
- 2021, MSRA Stars of Tomorrow Internship Program Award, Microsoft
- 2020, National Scholarship for Graduate Students, China
- 2020, Excellent Student Exchange Scholarship, Peking University
- 2020, Huawei Fellowship
- 2019, Intel Fellowship
- 2019, HeHE Fellowship
- Travel Fellowship, ICLR/NeurIPS/ICML/AAAI/SDM