Hi there 👋，I am a second-year CS PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. I am fortunate to have Professor Xiangliang Zhang as my advisor and grateful for the guidance of Professor Yapeng Tian.

Currently, my research focuses on: (1) building reliable multimodal foundation models and agentic systems with strong multimodal understanding, reasoning, and long-horizon decision-making capabilities; (2) advancing knowledge-intensive multimodal systems, including retrieval-augmented generation and agentic workflows, for scientific and real-world applications.

🔥 News

2026.04: 📢 We are excited to announce the KnowledgeMR Workshop at CVPR 2026. We invite paper submissions.
2026.04: 🎉🎉 One paper accepted by ACL 2026.
2025.09: 🎉🎉 Two papers accepted by EMNLP 2025.
2025.09: 📢 We are excited to announce the AI for Scientific Research Workshop at AAAI 2026. We invite paper submissions.
2025.06: 📢 We are excited to announce the KnowledgeMR Workshop at ICCV 2025. We invite paper submissions.
2025.06: 🎓 We will organize a tutorial on Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning at CVPR 2025. See you in Nashville!
2025.05: 🎉🎉 Three papers accepted by ACL 2025.
2025.05: Started Research Scientist Internship at Bosch Research.
2025.01: 🎉🎉 One paper accepted by Reasoning and Planning for LLMs @ ICLR 2025.
2024.11: 🎉🎉 One paper accepted by WSDM 2025.
2024.09: 🎉🎉 One first-author paper accepted by EMNLP 2024.
2024.05: I have passed the qualifying exam.
2024.05: 🎉🎉 One paper accepted by ACL 2024.
2023.10: 🎉🎉 One paper accepted by EMNLP 2023.

📚 Organization of Tutorials and Workshops

KnowledgeMR: Workshop on Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Reasoning
CVPR 2026
[Link]
AI4Research: Workshop on AI for Scientific Research
AAAI 2026
[Link]
KnowledgeMR: Workshop on Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Reasoning
ICCV 2025
[Link]
Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning Tutorial: Frontiers in Integrating Vision, Language, and Symbolic Representations
CVPR 2025
[Link]

📝 Publications

* indicates equal contribution

MM-VARA: Understanding-Then-Retrieving for Agentic Multimodal RAG
Tianyu Yang, Simon Shir, Zhenzhen Li, Minhao Cheng, Xiangliang Zhang
arXiv 2026
Agentic Multimodal RAG: Roles, Decisions, and Evaluation
Tianyu Yang*, Wenliang Guo*, Xiujin Liu, Shijian Deng, Yilun Zhao, Yapeng Tian, Xiangliang Zhang
arXiv 2026
Deconstructing Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: Towards a Unified Perception-Alignment-Reasoning Paradigm
Tianyu Yang*, Sihong Wu*, Yilun Zhao, Zhenwen Liang, Lisen Dai, Chen Zhao, Minhao Cheng, Arman Cohan, Xiangliang Zhang
ACL 2026
Quest2DataAgent: Automating End-to-End Scientific Data Collection
Tianyu Yang, Yuhan Liu, Ethan Brown, Sobin Alosious, Jason Rohr, Tengfei Luo, Xiangliang Zhang
EMNLP 2025
CLIPErase: Efficient Unlearning of Visual-Textual Associations in CLIP
Tianyu Yang, Lisen Dai, Xiangqi Wang, Minhao Cheng, Yapeng Tian, Xiangliang Zhang
ACL 2025
[pdf]
SaSR-Net: Source-Aware Semantic Representation Network for Enhancing Audio-Visual Question Answering
Tianyu Yang, Yiyang Nan, Lisen Dai, Zhenwen Liang, Yapeng Tian, Xiangliang Zhang
EMNLP 2024
[pdf]
Self-Improvement in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey
Shijian Deng, Kai Wang, Tianyu Yang, Harsh Singh, Yapeng Tian
EMNLP 2025
[pdf]
Physics: Benchmarking Foundation Models for PhD-Qualifying Exam Physics Problem Solving
Kaiyue Feng, Yilun Zhao, Yixin Liu, Tianyu Yang, Chen Zhao, John Sous, Arman Cohan
ACL 2025 (Also at ICLR@ Reasoning and Planning for LLMs 2025)
[pdf]
Beyond Single-Value Metrics: Evaluating and Enhancing LLM Unlearning with Cognitive Diagnosis
Yicheng Lang, Kehan Guo, Yue Huang, Yujun Zhou, Haomin Zhuang, Tianyu Yang, Yao Su, Xiangliang Zhang
ACL 2025
[pdf]
WildlifeLookup: A Chatbot Facilitating Wildlife Management with Accessible Data and Insights
Xiangqi Wang, Tianyu Yang, Jason Rohr, Brett Scheffers, Nitesh Chawla, Xiangliang Zhang
WSDM 2025
[pdf]
SceMQA: A Scientific College Entrance Level Multimodal Question Answering Benchmark
Zhenwen Liang, Kehan Guo, Gang Liu, Taicheng Guo, Yujun Zhou, Tianyu Yang, Jiajun Jiao, Renjie Pi, Jipeng Zhang, Xiangliang Zhang
ACL 2024
[pdf]
UniMath: A Foundational and Multimodal Mathematical Reasoner
Zhenwen Liang, Tianyu Yang, Jipeng Zhang, Xiangliang Zhang
EMNLP 2023
[pdf]

📖 Educations

2023.09 – Present, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN
PhD in Computer Science

💬 Personal Service

Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review (2021–2025) and other ACL events, CVPR, COLM, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, ECCV, ICLR

💻 Work Experience