Jingcheng Yang  杨景程

B.S. Computer Science + Philosophy

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Class of 2028

jy95 [at] illinois [dot] edu

I am an undergraduate CS and Philosophy student at UIUC, where I'm incredibly fortunate to be advised by Prof. Klara Nahrstedt at the MONET research group.
My research centers on LLM/VLMs, with an emphasis on interpretability and understanding their internal mechanisms.
In philosophy, I am fascinated by the concept of emergence and the ultimate question — at what point do AI models possess consciousness?

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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ALL

* 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, 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]

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