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.
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
Full Resume in PDF.
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