Multimodal learning · Visual reasoning

Understanding & improving
multimodal intelligence.

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Georgia, advised by Dr. Jin Sun and Dr. Ninghao Liu. My research centers on multimodal learning, vision-language models, and model interpretability, with the goal of building multimodal models that are more capable, reliable, and interpretable in real-world scenarios.

Prior to my Ph.D., I received my Master’s degree from the National University of Singapore, where I was advised by Dr. Guillaume Sartoretti and worked on topics at the intersection of robotics and machine learning.

Multimodal Learning Vision-Language Models Reinforcement Learning Model Interpretability

01 Latest news

  • 2026.10 Our paper Self-Improving Small Object Grounding in LVLMs was accepted to WACV 2027 🎉
  • 2026.10 Our open-source project AnyJev has reached ★ ~1.3k GitHub stars (Oct. 14, 2026)! Read the technical report.
  • 2026.08 Our preprint Self-Evolving Code-with-Image Reasoning is now available on arXiv.
  • 2026.05 Our paper RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers was accepted to ICML 2026 🎉
  • 2026.02 Our paper Common Inpainted Objects In-N-Out of Context was accepted to CVPR 2026 🎉
  • 2025.05 Our paper Concept-Centric Token Interpretation for Vector-Quantized Generative Models was accepted to ICML 2025 🎉
  • 2024.11 Received the Distinguished Paper Award at AMIA 2024 🏆

02 Research & publications

* denotes equal contribution

Technical Report · 2026

AnyJev Technical Report

Jiamu Zhang, Tianze Yang, Yucheng Shi, Evan Chen, Zixiang Nie, Kelly Wan, Liangjie Hong, Ninghao Liu, Liang Wu
Technical Report, 2026
Paper · Code ★ ~1.3k GitHub stars as of Oct. 14, 2026

arXiv 2026

Self-Evolving Code-with-Image Reasoning

Tianze Yang, Liang Wu, Ruitong Sun, Yucheng Shi, Yanqiao Wang, Mayank Darbari, Ninghao Liu, Jin Sun, Liangjie Hong
arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.11292, 2026
Paper

Under Review

TRON: Targeted Rule-Verifiable Online Environments for Visual Reasoning RL

Tianze Yang*, Yucheng Shi*, Ruitong Sun, Jingyuan Huang, Ninghao Liu, Jin Sun
Project Page

WACV 2027

Self-Improving Small Object Grounding in LVLMs

Tianze Yang, Yucheng Shi, Ruitong Sun, Ninghao Liu, Jin Sun
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2027 Project Page

ICML 2026

RSTR: Reducing SpatioTemporal Redundancy in Diffusion Transformers

Ruitong Sun, Tianze Yang, Wei Niu, Jin Sun
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026

CVPR 2026

Common Inpainted Objects In-N-Out of Context

Tianze Yang*, Tyson Jordan*, Ninghao Liu, Jin Sun
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2026 Project Page

ICML 2025

Concept-Centric Token Interpretation for Vector-Quantized Generative Models

Tianze Yang*, Yucheng Shi*, Mengnan Du, Xuansheng Wu, Qiaoyu Tan, Jin Sun, Ninghao Liu
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2025

BIBM 2025

SearchRAG: Can Search Engines Be Helpful for LLM-based Medical Question Answering?

Yucheng Shi, Tianze Yang, Canyu Chen, Quanzheng Li, Tianming Liu, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu
IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM) 2025

AMIA 2024

MKRAG: Medical Knowledge Retrieval Augmented Generation for Medical Question Answering

Yucheng Shi*, Shaochen Xu*, Tianze Yang*, Zhengliang Liu, Tianming Liu, Xiang Li, Ninghao Liu
American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium (AMIA) 2024 (Distinguished Paper Award)

ICRA 2024

Alpha: Attention-based long-horizon pathfinding in highly-structured areas

Chengyang He, Tianze Yang, Tanishq Duhan, Yutong Wang, Guillaume Sartoretti
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024

MRS 2023

Intent-based deep reinforcement learning for multi-agent informative path planning

Tianze Yang, Yuhong Cao, Guillaume Sartoretti
International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems (MRS) 2023

03 Research experience

  • 2026 Summer & Fall Research Intern · Nokia · Sunnyvale, CA

04 Education

  • 2023.08 – Present Ph.D. in Computer Science · University of Georgia
  • 2021.08 – 2023.06 M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering · National University of Singapore
  • 2016.09 – 2020.06 B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering · Shandong University