Jingcheng Yang  杨景程

B.S. Computer Science + Philosophy

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Class of 2027

jy95 [at] illinois [dot] edu

I am an undergraduate CS and Philosophy student at UIUC, advised by Prof. Klara Nahrstedt at the MONET research group.
My research focuses on LLM/VLM reasoning and interpretability.

Publications

* denotes equal contribution

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

[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)

[PDF]

Eduation

UIUC, B.S. in Computer Science + Philosophy (2024 - 2027)

SCIE, Highschool (2020 - 2024)

Philosophy

I'm interested in the philosophy of mind - mind uploading, personal identity, and personhood.
Personhood should be granted to any aligned artificial system of sufficient intelligence.

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.

Full-Stack

I am experienced in database management, RESTful APIs, S3 storage and payment systems, as well as CSS/HTML, React and MAUI for front-end development.

My primary tech stack is ASP.NET + mySQL + React/Javascript + .NET MAUI/Xamarin.

Portfolio[s]

Digital Media & Design Technical Art & Game Design Software Development