I am a CS Ph.D. student at UNC Chapel Hill, supervised by Prof. Mingyu Ding and Prof. Huaxiu Yao. I received both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Tongji University. I interned at UC Berkeley as a visiting student researcher, where I collaborated with Prof. Masayoshi Tomizuka, Prof. Mingyu Ding, and Dr. Wei Zhan.
My research interests include vision-language model, RL for reasoning models , and embodied AI. And my research goal is to improve the performance of LLMs and VLMs through reinforcement learning and other post-training techniques, and to leverage these models to build efficient and intelligent agents capable of interacting with the physical world (embodied intelligence) and driving scientific exploration (AI for Science).
I am actively seeking 2026 summer internships. Let’s connect!
🔥 News
- 2025.11: 🎉🎉 One paper is accepted by AAAI 2026.
- 2025.10: Alignment Tipping Process: How Self-Evolution Pushes LLM Agents Off the Rails is preprinted.
- 2025.09: We released SciReasoner, a scientific reasoning foundation model covering 103 tasks. It is pretrained on a 206B-token corpus and further enhanced through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to continually improve its reasoning ability. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance on more than 50 tasks. Paper, Github, Hugging Face
- 2025.08: We released A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers, providing a comprehensive, data-centric roadmap of Sci-LLMs from foundational models to agentic frontiers. Paper, Github
- 2025.08: We released VIPER-R1, a multimodal model for Visual Induction for Physics-based Equation Reasoning to discover fundamental symbolic formulas. Paper, Project.
- 2025.06: PhysUniBench is released, which is a large-scale multimodal benchmark for evaluating undergraduate-level physics reasoning in AI models. Paper, Project.
- 2025.06: 🎉🎉 I received my Master degree from Tongji University, and got the honor of Shanghai Outstanding Graduate(Top 1%)!
- 2022.09: 🎉🎉 I was bestowed with the Nominee Award for Shanghai University Student Annual Character, a recognition of paramount importance in evaluating the comprehensive aptitudes and societal influence of college students within the Shanghai municipality. Only 20 people in Shanghai receive the award each year (including nominees)!
- 2021.05: 🎉🎉 I received the Tongji University Pursuit of Excellence Award, the highest honor for undergraduates at Tongji University! Only three undergraduates are able to receive this honor each year!
- 2020.10: 🎉🎉 I won the Best Paper Award in CUMCM! CUMCM is the largest basic academic competition for undergraduate students in China, and 3 papers were awarded from 42,000+ candidates!
📝 Publications
Mimicking the Physicist’s Eye:A VLM-centric Approach for Physics Formula Discovery (VIPER-R1)
Jiaqi Liu, Songning Lai, Pengze Li, Di Yu, Wenjie Zhou, Yiyang Zhou, Peng Xia, Zijun Wang, Xi Chen, Shixiang Tang, Lei Bai, Wanli Ouyang, Mingyu Ding, Huaxiu Yao, Aoran Wang, accepted by NeurIPS 2025 Efficient Reasoning Workshop.
SciReasoner: Laying the Scientific Reasoning Ground Across Disciplines
Yizhou Wang$^\star$, Chen Tang$^\star$, Han Deng$^\star$, Jiabei Xiao$^\star$, Jiaqi Liu$^\star$, Jianyu Wu$^\star$, …, Philip Torr, Shixiang Tang, Xinzhu Ma, Wanli Ouyang, Lei Bai et al. . arXiv:2509.21320.
Alignment Tipping Process: How Self-Evolution Pushes LLM Agents Off the Rails
Siwei Han, Jiaqi Liu, Yaofeng Su, Wenbo Duan, Xinyuan Liu, Cihang Xie, Mohit Bansal, Mingyu Ding, Linjun Zhang, Huaxiu Yao, arxiv:2510.04860.
A Survey of Scientific Large Language Models: From Data Foundations to Agent Frontiers
Ming Hu, Chenglong Ma, Wei Li, Wanghan Xu, Jiamin Wu, Jucheng Hu, Tianbin Li, Guohang Zhuang, Jiaqi Liu, Yingzhou Lu, …, Wanli Ouyang, Yu Qiao, Zongyuan Ge, Shixiang Tang, Junjun He et al. . arxiv:2508.21148.
Language-Driven Policy Distillation for Cooperative Driving in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Jiaqi Liu, Chengkai Xu, Peng Hang, Jian Sun, Mingyu Ding, Wei Zhan, Masayoshi Tomizuka, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2025.3551098.
Jiaqi Liu, Peng Hang, Xiaocong Zhao, Jianqiang Wang, Jian Sun, IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence(TAI), DOI: 10.1109/TAI.2024.3497918.
Jiaqi Liu, Peng Hang, Xiaoxiang Na, Chao Huang, Jian Sun, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS), DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2024.3503092, 2024.
Yicheng Guo$^\star$, Jiaqi Liu$^\star$, Rongjie Yu, Peng Hang, Jian Sun, accepted by ECCV 2024 MAAS Workshop(Oral).
🎖 Honors and Awards
- 2025.06 Outstanding Graduates from Shanghai(Top 1%).
- 2024.10 National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China
- 2022.10 Shanghai University Student Annual Character (Nomination Award)!
- 2022.06 Outstanding Graduates from Shanghai(Top 1%).
- 2021.12 National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China
- 2021.05 Tongji University Pursuit of Excellence Award (3/4450) !
- 2020.10 Best paper award of Contemporary Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CUMCM) (3/ 42000+) !
- 2020.10 First Prize in the Shanghai College Students Transportation Innovation Competition
- 2020.5 First Prize in Tongji University Mathematical Modeling Contest
- 2019.12 National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China
📖 Educations
- 2025.08 - now, PhD, UNC Chapel Hill, NC, US
- 2022.09 - 2025.06, Master, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
- 2018.09 - 2022.06, Bachelor, Tongji University, Shanghai, China (GPA: 4.89/5, rank: 1/163)
📚 Academic Services
Reviews
- Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICML, ICCV, AAAI, ICRA, ITSC
- Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (TIV), IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS), IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning(TNNLS),IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), Journal of Field Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (TII), IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT), IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (TASE), IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Nonlinear Dynamics, Journal of Advanced Transportation, Scientific Reports
Mentoring
- Yaofeng Su: Fudan University
- Kaiwen Xiong: Shanghai Jiao Tong University
- Carsen Sharkey: UNC Chapel Hill
- Yicheng Guo: Tongji University
- Chengkai Xu: Tongji University
- Yuhang Zhang: Tongji University
Teaching Assistant
- CS 790-183: Transfer Learning, UNC, Fall 2025