I am Cheng Yang, a second-year Ph.D. student in BergLab at UC San Diego, advised by Prof. Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick.
Before UCSD, I received my master’s degree from Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Yujiu Yang, and my bachelor’s degree from Central South University. I have also been fortunate to work with Dr. Ani Nenkova and Dr. Jack Wang at Adobe Research, Prof. Junxian He on LLM agents, and Prof. Lemao Liu on machine translation.
My research focuses on training and evaluating multimodal LLMs and agents. Listed below are my first/co-first author papers. See my Google Scholar profile for the full list.
UReason: Benchmarking Reasoning-to-Generation Alignment in Unified Multimodal Models
Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Huijuan Wang, Ivan Yee Lee, Yong Liu, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
EMNLP 2026 🏆 Outstanding Paper Award Oral Paper · Project
InfoEdit: Probing Global Layout Reasoning in Infographic Editing
Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Huijuan Wang, Bo Shui, Yaokang Wu, Muzi Tao, Yibo Yan, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Are VLMs Seeing or Just Saying? Uncovering the Illusion of Visual Re-examination
Chufan Shi, Cheng Yang, Yaokang Wu, Linhao Jin, Bo Shui, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Xuezhe Ma
Do Text Edits Generalize to Visual Generation? Benchmarking Cross-Modal Knowledge Editing in UMMs
Xin Gao, Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
ChartMimic: Evaluating LMM's Cross-Modal Reasoning Capability via Chart-to-Code Generation
Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Yaxin Liu, Bo Shui, Junjie Wang, Mohan Jing, Linran Xu, Xinyu Zhu, Siheng Li, Yuxiang Zhang, Gongye Liu, Xiaomei Nie, Deng Cai, Yujiu Yang
AgentBoard: An Analytical Evaluation Board of Multi-turn LLM Agents
Chang Ma, Junlei Zhang, Zhihao Zhu, Cheng Yang, Yujiu Yang, Yaohui Jin, Zhenzhong Lan, Lingpeng Kong, Junxian He
NeurIPS 2024 Oral Paper · Code
LLM2: Let Large Language Models Harness System 2 Reasoning
Cheng Yang, Chufan Shi, Siheng Li, Bo Shui, Yujiu Yang, Wai Lam
A Survey on the Honesty of Large Language Models
Siheng Li, Cheng Yang, Taiqiang Wu, Chufan Shi, Yuji Zhang, Xinyu Zhu, Zesen Cheng, Deng Cai, Mo Yu, Lemao Liu, Jie Zhou, Yujiu Yang, Ngai Wong, Xixin Wu, Wai Lam
TMLR 2025 Paper