Jingcheng Yang  杨景程

B.S. Computer Science + Philosophy

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Class of 2028

jy95 [at] illinois [dot] edu

I'm a 2nd-year undergraduate student studying CS and Philosophy at UIUC, where I'm advised by Klara Nahrstedt at the MONET research group.
My research centers on LLM/VLMs, with an emphasis on interpretability and understanding their internal mechanisms.

News

Nov 2025 | Honored to receive the Roy H. Campbell Scholarship from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Publications

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* denotes equal contribution

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

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

arXiv preprint, 2025

[PDF]

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, 2025

[PDF]

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

arXiv preprint, 2025

[PDF] [Code] [Project Page]

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 Workshop on Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning, 2025 (Oral Presentation)

[PDF]

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

arXiv preprint, 2025

[PDF]

AnyLoc: Energy-efficient Visual Localization in Dynamic and Large-Scale Scenes without Pain

Beitong Tian*, Jingcheng Yang*, Jionghao Wei, Zhenggang Tang, Yuheng Wang, Hongwen Xiao, Haozhen Zheng, Mingyuan Wu, Shiv Trivedi, Klara Nahrstedt

preprint

Awards

2025 | Roy H. Campbell Scholarship

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Recognized as the highest-ranked nominee representing UIUC for the 2026 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

2024-2025 | Dean's List

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign B.S. Computer Science + Philosophy (2024 - 2028)

Shenzhen College of International Education Highschool Diploma (2020 - 2024)

Shen Wai International School Primary and Secondary, IB PYP/MYP (2014 - 2020)

Philosophy

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

Game Development

I am an indie developer. I have been making games since I was 12 (checkout my first game CubeKiller). My favorite games are Half-Life, Halo, and Victoria 3.

Portfolio[s]

Digital Media & Design Technical Art & Game Design Software Development