Davis, CA, US
Google Scholar 
Github 
Twitter I am an Associate Professor of the Computer Science Department at UC Davis. Prior to joining UC Davis, I was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech and a core member of the Sanghani AI Center. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UIUC where I worked with Heng Ji.
My research centers on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Our current research focuses on vision-language models, agentic AI, and the robustness of RL-based post-tuning. We are particularly interested in building multimodal AI systems that can better understand and interact with the physical world, while also studying issues such as reward hacking and other alignment failures to make post-trained models more reliable and trustworthy.
News and Highlights
-
(04/21/26) Statement: I'm aware that there are some negative comments about me on the so-called Black/Red List. While I respect constructive feedback, most of them are inaccurate and biased. If you would like to learn about the real culture and advising environment of my lab, please feel free to speak with my current and former PhD/MS students and interns.
-
(04/10/26): Start to serve as an Associate Editor of the ACM Computing Surveys.
-
(04/01/26): Three PhD students (Zhiyang Xu, Minqian Liu, and Jingyuan Qi) are graduating from my lab by this summer.
-
(03/01/26): Excited to give a talk at the Agentic AI Frontier Seminar on "Goodhart’s Revenge: Reward Hacking in RL-Tuned LLMs, and How We Fight Back".
-
(09/18/25): Four papers accepted by EMNLP'2025 and three papers accepted by NeurIPS'25. Congrats to all students and collaborators.
-
(05/20/25): We have successfully hosted a series of Agentic AI for Scientific Discovery workshop at AAAI Spring Symposium, ICLR'2025, and WWW'2025! Recordings of some wonderful keynote talks are being released soon.
-
(05/03/25): Received the Best Paper Award from the AI4Search workshop at AAAI'2025.
-
(04/03/25): Successfully hosted a series of AI4Search workshop at IJCAI'2024 and AAAI'2025.
-
(01/22/25): two papers accepted by NAACL'2025 main track and two are accepted at the Demo track! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.
-
(01/22/25): Three papers accepted by ICLR'2025! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.
-
(09/20/24): Six papers accepted by EMNLP'2024! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.
-
(07/01/24): Glad to share that our lab has moved to UC Davis!
-
(05/17/24): Four papers accepted by ACL'2024! Congrats to Zhiyang, Ying, Zihao and all collaborators.
-
(04/01/24): Honored to receive the Outstanding New Assistant Professor award from the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.
-
(03/23/24): Serving as a Senior Area Chair for EMNLP'2024.
-
(03/13/24): Three papers accepted by NAACL'2024. Congrats to Minqian, Sijia, Pritika and all collaborators.
-
(02/25/24): Congrats to Zhiyang, Minqian, Jingyuan, Zihao, and Sijia on receiving internship offers from Meta AI, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Adobe Research, and Amazon AWS Research Lab (NYC).
-->
- ...