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News

[2025.10]. Joined NVIDIA as a full-time Research Scientist.

[2025.5]. 1 paper accepted to ICML.

[2025.3]. 1 paper accepted to TMLR.

[2024.11]. 1 paper accepted to TMLR.

[2024.9]. 1 paper accepted to EMNLP 2024.

[2024.6]. Serve as Area Chairs/Action Editors for ACL, EMNLP, ARR.

[2024.5]. 1 paper accepted to ICML 2024.

[2024.3]. 2 papers accepted to NAACL 2024 (1 outstanding paper).

[2024.2]. 1 paper accepted to CVPR 2024.

[2024.1]. 2 papers accepted to ICLR 2024.

[2023]. ……

Bio

I’m a research scientist at NVIDIA, and a final-year CS Ph.D. Candidate at UIUC, advised by Prof. Heng Ji. At NVIDIA, I work on LLMs post-training and LLM-based coding agents.

Recent Featured Publications

[Full Publications]

^* indicates equal contribution ⁺ indicates corresponding author

• Prioritizing Image-Related Tokens Enhances Vision-Language Pre-Training [paper]
  Yangyi Chen, Hao Peng, Tong Zhang, Heng Ji
  Arxiv 2025

• Scaling Laws for Predicting Downstream Performance in LLMs [paper]
  Yangyi Chen, Binxuan Huang, Yifan Gao, Zhengyang Wang, Jingfeng Yang, Heng Ji
  TMLR 2025

• A Single Transformer for Scalable Vision-Language Modeling [paper]
  Yangyi Chen^*, Xingyao Wang^*, Hao Peng, Heng Ji
  TMLR 2024

• Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents [paper]
  Xingyao Wang, Yangyi Chen, Lifan Yuan, Yizhe Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Hao Peng, Heng Ji
  ICML 2024

• SaySelf: Teaching LLMs to Express Confidence with Self-Reflective Rationales [paper]
  Tianyang Xu^*, Shujin Wu^*, Shizhe Diao, Xiaoze Liu, Xingyao Wang, Yangyi Chen⁺, Jing Gao⁺
  EMNLP 2024

• DRESS: Instructing Large Vision-Language Models to Align and Interact with Humans via Natural Language Feedback [paper]
  Yangyi Chen, Karan Sikka, Michael Cogswell, Heng Ji, Ajay Divakaran
  CVPR 2024

Education

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. in Computer Science; 2022-Present

• Huazhong University of Science and Technology, BS in Software Engineering; 2018-2022

Experience

• NVIDIA (Remote), Research Scientist; Oct 2025-Now;

• NVIDIA (Santa Clara), Research Intern; May-Oct 2025; Hosted by Dr. Wei Ping.

• Microsoft (Remote), Part-Time Research Intern; Feb-May 2025; Hosted by Dr. Zhengyuan Yang.

• Amazon (Palo Alto), Applied Scientist Research Intern; May-Aug 2024; Hosted by Dr. Binxuan Huang, Dr. Yifan Gao, and Dr. Zhengyang Wang. Topic: Scaling Laws for LLMs.

• SRI International (New Jersey), Research Intern; May-Aug 2023; Hosted by Dr. Karan Sikka, Dr. Michael Cogswell, and Dr. Ajay Divakaran. Topic: Scalable Supervision for Large Vision-Language Models.

Service

Area Chair/Action Editor

2025: ACL/ARR (Feb)

2024: ACL/ARR (Feb), ARR (Apr, Aug, Oct), EMNLP/ARR (Jun)

Reviewer

2025: NeurIPS, COLM, ICML, ICML Position Paper Track

2024: COLM, ICML, ICLR

2023: ICLR, EMNLP, EMNLP Industry Track, NeurIPS, NeurIPS D&B Track, ARR (Feb, Apr, Jun, Aug, Oct, Dec), ACL (Outstanding Award), IEEE T-IFS

2022: NeurIPS D&B Track, EMNLP, ARR (Dec)

Assistant: AAAI 2022, ARR 2022 (Jan), EMNLP 2021, ARR 2021 (Oct, Nov)

Personal

When I was young (around 20), I enjoyed playing the piano and basketball. When I started doing research, my interests changed and I quickly fell in love with all kinds of Chinese food and mobile basketball games. But always, I am a big fan of milk tea!!