Portrait of Jingcheng Yang, taken in Hong Kong with the background being the Victoria Harbor in blue tint.

Jingcheng Yang  杨景程

Computer Science & Philosophy

The University of Chicago
Class of 2028

jingchengyang [at] uchicago [dot] edu

I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago, working with Ari Holtzman on interpretability research. Previously, I studied computer science at UIUC, advised by Klara Nahrstedt. I received an honorable mention in the 2026 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award. My research interests include large language models, interpretability, and multimodal representations.

Publications & Preprints

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* denotes equal contribution

Where is the Seahorse Emoji? When Language Models Fail to Settle

Jingcheng Yang, Todd Nief, Ari Holtzman

preprint, 2026

Interpreting Diffusion Language Models Over Denoising Time

Jingcheng Yang*, Shangtong Wu*, Yifan Kang, Tianhu Xiong, Mingyuan Wu, Haozhen Zheng, Alexander Schwing, Klara Nahrstedt

COLM 2026 Workshop on Non-Autoregressive Language Models for Fast & Flexible Text Generation

Spreadsheet-RL: Advancing Large Language Model Agents on Realistic Spreadsheet Tasks via Reinforcement Learning

Banghao Chi*, Yining Xie*, Mingyuan Wu*, Jingcheng Yang, Jize Jiang, Zhaoheng Li, Shengyi Qian, Minjia Zhang, Klara Nahrstedt, Rui Hou, Xiangjun Fan, Hanchao Yu

arXiv preprint, 2026

Circuit Tracing in Vision-Language Models: Understanding the Internal Mechanisms of Multimodal Thinking

Jingcheng Yang*, Tianhu Xiong*, Shengyi Qian, Klara Nahrstedt, Mingyuan Wu

CVPR 2026 Findings

VTool-R1: VLMs Learn to Think with Images via Reinforcement Learning on Multimodal Tool Use

Mingyuan Wu*, Jingcheng Yang*, Jize Jiang, Meitang Li, Kaizhuo Yan, Hanchao Yu, Minjia Zhang, Chengxiang Zhai, Klara Nahrstedt

ICLR 2026

SVR-R1: Bootstrapping Multi-modal Reasoning with Self-verification in Reinforcement Learning

Mingyuan Wu, Jingcheng Yang, Shengyi Qian, Xudong Wang, Jize Jiang, Qifan Wang, Aashu Singh, Khoi Pham, Fei Liu, Zhaolun Su, Zhuokai Zhao, Klara Nahrstedt, Jianyu Wang, Hanchao Yu

arXiv preprint, 2026

AquaVLM: Improving Underwater Situation Awareness with Mobile Vision Language Models

Beitong Tian*, Lingzhi Zhao*, Bo Chen, Haozhen Zheng, Jingcheng Yang, Mingyuan Wu, Deepak Vasisht, Klara Nahrstedt

ACM IMWUT 2026

Aha Moment Revisited: Are VLMs Truly Capable of Self Verification in Inference-time Scaling?

Mingyuan Wu*, Meitang Li*, Jingcheng Yang*, Jize Jiang, Kaizhuo Yan, Zhaoheng Li, Minjia Zhang, Klara Nahrstedt

NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning (Oral Presentation)

Awards

2026 | Honorable Mention · CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award

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Computing Research Association

This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

Education

Seal of The University of Chicago

The University of Chicago

( 2026 - 2028 )

B.S. Computer Science

Seal of The University of Illinois

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

( 2024 - 2026 )

Computer Science

Shenzhen College of International Education

( 2020 - 2024 )

Highschool Diploma

Shen Wai International School

( 2014 - 2020 )

PYP and MYP IB Diploma

Philosophy

I'm interested in the philosophy of mind, and broadly - metaphysics & epistemology.

Games

I started making games when I was 12, check out my first game CubeKiller.

Portfolio of games and projects I've built.