Biography
I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Furong Huang and Prof. Tianyi Zhou. My research interests are data-centric AI, computer vision (CV), and vision-language models (VLMs), especially exploring synthetic data generation and self-improving learning paradigms to improve model training and evaluation.
I got my M.Eng. degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at University of California, Berkeley. Before joining UCB, I obtained my B.Eng. degree in Industrial Engineering at Tsinghua University.
Publications
* denotes equal contribution.
Visual Contrastive Self-Distillation
Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Yijiang Li, Yuqi Jia, Furong Huang, Tianyi Zhou, Di Fu.
arXiv 2026Self-Evolving Visual Questioner
Yijun Liang, Hengguang Zhou, Ming Li, Lichen Li, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Tianyi Zhou.
arXiv 2026LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment
Han Chen, Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Yijun Liang, Dawei Zhou, Hong Jiao, Tianyi Zhou.
arXiv 2026Do Prompt-Elicited Trajectories Reflect Training-Time Reward Hacking? A Systematic Study on Monitoring Training-Time Reward Hacking in Code Generations
Lichen Li, Hengguang Zhou, Yijun Liang, Tianyi Zhou, Cho-Jui Hsieh.
arXiv 2026History-Conditioned Spatio-Temporal Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Navigation
Qitong Wang, Yijun Liang, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou, Christopher Rasmussen.
IROS 2026V-REX: Benchmarking Exploratory Visual Reasoning via Chain-of-Questions
Chenrui Fan*, Yijun Liang*, Shweta Bhardwaj*, Kwesi Cobbina, Ming Li, Tianyi Zhou.
ECCV 2026ColorBench: Can VLMs See and Understand the Colorful World? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Color Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness
Yijun Liang*, Ming Li*, Chenrui Fan, Ziyue Li, Dang Nguyen, Kwesi Adu Cobbina, Shweta Bhardwaj, Jiuhai Chen, Fuxiao Liu, Tianyi Zhou.
NeurIPS 2025Diffusion Curriculum: Synthetic-to-Real Generative Curriculum Learning via Image-Guided Diffusion
Yijun Liang*, Shweta Bhardwaj*, Tianyi Zhou.
ICCV 2025Mosaic-IT: Free Compositional Data Augmentation Improves Instruction Tuning
Ming Li, Pei Chen, Chenguang Wang, Hongyu Zhao, Yijun Liang, Yupeng Hou, Fuxiao Liu, Tianyi Zhou.
ACL 2025CaughtCheating: Is Your MLLM a Good Cheating Detective? Exploring the Boundary of Visual Perception and Reasoning
Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Yijun Liang, Xiyao Wang, Yuhang Zhou, Xiyang Wu, Yuqing Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tianyi Zhou.
arXiv 2025PEDANTS: Cheap but Effective and Interpretable Answer Equivalence
Zongxia Li, Ishani Mondal, Yijun Liang, Huy Nghiem, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber.
EMNLP 2024GeoDRL: A Self-Learning Framework for Geometry Problem Solving Using Reinforcement Learning in Deductive Reasoning
Shuai Peng, Di Fu, Yijun Liang, Liangcai Gao, Zhi Tang.
ACL 2023Compute Like Humans: Interpretable Step-by-Step Symbolic Computation with Deep Neural Network
Shuai Peng, Di Fu, Yong Cao, Yijun Liang, Gu Xu, Liangcai Gao, Zhi Tang.
KDD 2022