Jiabao Ji

Ph.D. Student at UCSB

jiabaoji [AT] ucsb.edu

Bio

Hi! I'm Jiabao Ji, a 5th-year Ph.D. student at UCSB advised by Prof. Shiyu Chang. I also work closely with Dr. Yang Zhang.

My research focuses primarily on large language models. Recently, I am mainly focused on following areas:

Previously, I did some work in enhancing controllability for text-to-image diffusion models.

Before joining UCSB, I obtained my B.Eng. in Computer Science at ACM class, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. During my undergrad, I interned at X-lance Lab at SJTU working with Prof. Kai Yu and Prof. Lu Chen. I also had a remote summer intern at SLS group working with Prof. Tianxing He and Prof. James Glass.

Publications

Most recent publications on Google Scholar.
indicates equal contribution.

Practical Online KV Cache Compaction for LLM Agents: An Empirical Study

Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Li An, Rohit Jain, Gungor Polatkan, Siyu Zhu, Shiyu Chang

arXiv'26

Speculate While You Reason: Teaching Agents to Predict Their Next Tool Call via Joint Agent-Speculator RL

Jiabao Ji, Yujian Liu, Li An, Rohit Jain, Gungor Polatkan, Siyu Zhu, Shiyu Chang

EMNLP'26 Findings

VISUALSKILL: Multimodal Skills for Computer-Use Agents

Ziyan Jiang, Li An, Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Qiucheng Wu, Jacob Andreas, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang

arXiv'26

Unlearning by Construction: Auxiliary Prediction as a Path to LLM Unlearning

Jiabao Ji, Yujian Liu, Shiyu Chang

Machine Unlearning for Governance of Foundation Models (Springer)'26

Navigating the Clutter: Waypoint-Based Bi-Level Planning for Multi-Robot Systems

Jiabao Ji, Yongchao Chen, Yang Zhang, Ramana Rao Kompella, Chuchu Fan, Gaowen Liu, Shiyu Chang

CoRL'26

How Well Do Agentic Skills Work in the Wild: Benchmarking LLM Skill Usage in Realistic Settings

Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Li An, Tommi Jaakkola, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang

COLM'26

DEEPAMBIGQA: Ambiguous Multi-hop Questions for Benchmarking LLM Answer Completeness

Jiabao Ji, Min Li, Priyanshu Kumar, Shiyu Chang, Saloni Potdar

arXiv'25

HarnessLLM: Automatic Testing Harness Generation via Reinforcement Learning

Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Yang Zhang, Wenbo Guo, Tommi Jaakkola, Shiyu Chang

arXiv'25

Collision- and Reachability-Aware Multi-Robot Control with Grounded LLM Planners

Jiabao Ji, Yongchao Chen, Yang Zhang, Ramana Rao Kompella, Chuchu Fan, Gaowen Liu, Shiyu Chang

arXiv'25

THINKPRUNE: Pruning Long Chain-of-Thought of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

Bairu Hou, Yang Zhang, Jiabao Ji, Yujian Liu, Kaizhi Qian, Jacob Andreas, Shiyu Chang

TMLR'25

DFM: Dialogue Foundation Model for Universal Large-Scale Dialogue-Oriented Task Learning

Zhi Chen, Da Ma, Hanqi Li, Lu Chen, Jiabao Ji, Yuncong Liu, Bei Chen, Mengyue Wu, Su Zhu, Xin Dong, Fujiang Ge, Qingliang Miao, Jian-Guang Lou, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu

AI Open'25

HARDTESTGEN: A High-Quality RL Verifier Generation Pipeline for LLM Algorithmic Coding

Zhongmou He, Yee Man Choi, Kexun Zhang, Jiabao Ji, Junting Zhou, Dejia Xu, Ivan Bercovich, Aidan Zhang, Yixiao Zeng, Lei Li

ICLR'26

Reversing the Forget-Retain Objectives: An Efficient LLM Unlearning Framework from Logit Difference

Jiabao Ji, Yujian Liu, Yang Zhang, Gaowen Liu, Ramana Rao Kompella, Sijia Liu, Shiyu Chang

NeurIPS'24

Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing

Jiabao Ji, Bairu Hou, Zhen Zhang, Guanhua Zhang, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Yang Zhang, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Shiyu Chang

NAACL'24

Defending Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks via Semantic Smoothing

Jiabao Ji, Bairu Hou, Alexander Robey, George J. Pappas, Hamed Hassani, Yang Zhang, Eric Wong, Shiyu Chang

IJCNLP-AACL'25

Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion

Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu, Ryan Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Ritwik Sinha, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang

EMNLP'25 Findings

Towards Coherent Image Inpainting Using Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models

Guanhua Zhang, Jiabao Ji, Yang Zhang, Mo Yu, Tommi Jaakkola, Shiyu Chang

ICML'23

Improving Diffusion Models for Scene Text Editing with Dual Encoders

Jiabao Ji, Guanhua Zhang, Zhaowen Wang, Bairu Hou, Zhifei Zhang, Brian Price, Shiyu Chang

TMLR'24

Controlling the Focus of Pretrained Language Generation Models

Jiabao Ji, Yoon Kim, James Glass, Tianxing He

ACL'22 Findings

WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension

Xingyu Chen, Zihan Zhao, Lu Chen, Jiabao Ji, Danyang Zhang, Ao Luo, Yuxuan Xiong, Kai Yu

EMNLP'21

Vitæ

Full Resume in PDF.

Services

Conference reviewer: ICML'23, 24, 25, 26; Neurips'23, 24, 25, 26; ICLR'24, 25, 26; CVPR'24, 25, 26; WACV'26; ICCV' 25; ECCV' 26; ACL'24, 26; COLM'24, 25, 26; ARR 24 Dec, 25 May, 25 July, 25 Oct, 26 Jan

Workshop reviewer: Neurips'24 AdvML-Frontiers; RSS'25 FM4RoboPlan

TA: CSW8-W23; CS190I-W23,W24; CS165B-S22,S24

Misc

• I was a KDE+archlinux user with good animation and enormous amount of apps brought by pacman. But I changed to MacOS for more stable working environment. I also bought a Framework 16 for a better Linux experience.
• Vibe-coded a lyric app yalyric for macos with claudecode in several hundred interaction turns by pressing yes and talking to claudecode. Please check it out if you're interested.
• I started to use Vim and tiling window manager like i3/dwm/amethyst recently. Now I find aerospace to be a better TLM for macos.
• I watch many sports. I'm a fan of Leo Messi, Derrick Rose, Tadej Pogačar, Max Verstappen.
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