Yongyuan Cheryl Liang

My research focuses on developing foundation models and intelligent agents. I actively explore both theoretical frameworks and empirical findings, with specific research interests in:

Multi-Modal Foundation Models: Large multi-modal models/generative models for 2D/3D virtual and physical agentic tasks.
Alignment: Post-training alignment including human preference alignment and cross-modality alignment.

In the previous few years, I have conducted research in Reinforcement Learning, Representations and Robustness.

Email / Google Scholar / Github / Twitter

I join UMD CS as a PhD student, advised by Prof. Furong Huang. I received my B.S. degree in Mathematics from Sun Yat-sen University.

I'm always happy to collaborate with graduate/undergraduate students. Please drop me an email if you want to work with me.
I'm actively looking for part-time/full-time internship opportunities starting from Fall 2025. Feel free to reach out if you're interested in my research.

Feb' 25	Magma to appear in CVPR 2025. Code and models have been released.
Jan' 25	Two papers to appear in ICLR 2025.
Jan' 25	Start to update Awesome-Generalist-Agents.
Sept' 24	Make-An-Agent to appear in NeurIPS 2024.
June' 24	ACE has been selected as a long oral presentation in ICML 2024.
May' 24	Two papers to appear in ICML 2024.
Feb' 24	Awarded a Dean's Fellowship.
Jan' 24	Three papers to appear in ICLR 2024, including two spotlights and one poster.

Publications

* denotes Equal Contributions and Project Lead; † indicates Equal Advising.

	Multi-Objective Alignment Avocado: A Unified Contrastive Framework for Multi-Objective Alignment of Language Models Yongyuan Liang, Xuejun Zhang, Ziqiao Ma, Joyce Chai, Furong Huang arXiv*, 2025 Project Page / Paper / Code / Models & Datasets / Twitter
	3D Multi-Modal Model LEMON: A Unified and Scalable 3D Multimodal Model for Universal Spatial Understanding Yongyuan Liang, Xiyao Wang, Yuanchen Ju, Jianwei Yang, Furong Huang arXiv, 2025 Spotlight Talks at CVPR Workshop CVinW, 2025 Project Page / Paper / Code / Models & Datasets / Twitter
	Agentic Multi-Modal Model Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents Magma Team CVPR, 2025 Project Page / Paper / Code / Models & Datasets / Twitter
	Embodied Multi-Modal Model TraceVLA: Visual Trace Prompting Enhances Spatial-Temporal Awareness for Generalist Robotic Policies Ruijie Zheng, Yongyuan Liang, Shuaiyi Huang, Jianfeng Gao, Hal Daumé III, Andrey Kolobov, Furong Huang, Jianwei Yang ICLR, 2025 Oral Talks at ICLR Workshop GenBot, 2025 Project Page / Paper / Code / Models / Twitter
	Generative Model Make-An-Agent: A Generalizable Policy Network Generator with Behavior-Prompted Diffusion Yongyuan Liang, Tingqiang Xu, Kaizhe Hu, Guangqi Jiang, Furong Huang, Huazhe Xu NeurIPS, 2024 Oral Talks at NeurIPS Workshop AFM, 2024 Project Page / Paper / Code / Models & Dataset / Twitter
	ViCrit: A Verifiable Reinforcement Learning Proxy Task for Visual Perception in VLMs Xiyao Wang, Zhengyuan Yang, Chao Feng, Yongyuan Liang, Yuhang Zhou, Xiaoyu Liu, Ziyi Zang, Ming Li, Chung-Ching Lin, Kevin Lin, Linjie Li†, Furong Huang†, Lijuan Wang† arXiv*, 2025 Project Page / Paper / Code / Models & Datasets / Twitter
	Robots Pre-Train Robots: Manipulation-Centric Robotic Representation from Large-Scale Robot Datasets Guangqi Jiang, Yifei Sun, Tao Huang, Huanyu Li, Yongyuan Liang†, Huazhe Xu† ICLR*, 2025 Project Page / Paper / Code / Models / Twitter
	PREMIER-TACO is a Few-Shot Policy Learner: Pretraining Multitask Representation via Temporal Action-Driven Contrastive Loss Ruijie Zheng, Yongyuan Liang, Xiyao Wang, Shuang Ma, Hal Daumé III, Huazhe Xu, John Langford, Praveen Palanisamy, Kalyan Basu, Furong Huang ICML, 2024 Project Page / Paper / Code / Twitter
	Reinforcement Learning ACE: Off-Policy Actor-Critic with Causality-Aware Entropy Regularization Tianying Ji, Yongyuan Liang, Yan Zeng, Yu Luo, Guowei Xu, Jiawei Guo, Ruijie Zheng, Furong Huang, Fuchun Sun, Huazhe Xu ICML, 2024 (Oral - Top 1.5%) Project Page / Paper / Code / Twitter
	DrM: Mastering Visual Reinforcement Learning through Dormant Ratio Minimization Guowei Xu, Ruijie Zheng, Yongyuan Liang, Xiyao Wang, Zhecheng Yuan, Tianying Ji, Yu Luo, Xiaoyu Liu, Jiaxin Yuan, Pu Hua, Shuzhen Li, Yanjie Ze, Hal Daumé III, Furong Huang, Huazhe Xu ICLR, 2024 (Spotlight - Top 5%)* Project Page / Paper / Code / Twitter
	Efficient Adversarial Training without Attacking: Worst-Case-Aware Robust Reinforcement Learning Yongyuan Liang, Yanchao Sun, Ruijie Zheng, Furong Huang NeurIPS, 2022 Spotlight Talks at NeurIPS Workshop SafeRL, 2021 Paper / Code / Slides
	Game-Theoretic Robust Reinforcement Learning Handles Temporally-Coupled Perturbations Yongyuan Liang, Yanchao Sun, Ruijie Zheng, Xiangyu Liu, Benjamin Eysenbach, Tuomas Sandholm, Furong Huang, Stephen Marcus McAleer ICLR, 2024 Paper / Twitter
	Is poisoning a real threat to LLM alignment? Maybe more so than you think Pankayaraj Pathmanathan, Souradip Chakraborty, Xiangyu Liu, Yongyuan Liang, Furong Huang AAAI, 2025 ICML Workshop on Models of Human Feedback for AI Alignment, 2024 Paper / Code
	Beyond Worst-case Attacks: Robust RL with Adaptive Defense via Non-dominated Policies Xiangyu Liu, Chenghao Deng, Yanchao Sun, Yongyuan Liang, Furong Huang ICLR, 2024 (Spotlight - Top 5%) Project Page / Paper / Code / Twitter
	Who Is the Strongest Enemy? Towards Optimal and Efficient Evasion Attacks in Deep RL Yanchao Sun, Ruijie Zheng, Yongyuan Liang, Furong Huang ICLR, 2022 Best Paper Award at NeurIPS Workshop SafeRL, 2021 Project Page / Paper / Code
	Certifiably Robust Policy Learning against Adversarial Communication in Multi-agent Systems Yanchao Sun, Ruijie Zheng, Parisa Hassanzadeh, Yongyuan Liang, Soheil Feizi, Sumitra Ganesh, Furong Huang ICLR, 2023 Paper / Code