About Me

Hi! I’m Jiaxun Zhang, a first-year PhD student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, advised by Prof. Jingbo Shang. Previously, I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Ismini Lourentzou, Prof. Jiaxuan You, and Prof. Koustuv Saha. My research interests lie in large language models, AI agents, and their applications.

I am always happy to chat and open to research collaborations. Feel free to reach out!

📢 News

• [Feb 2026] 1 paper accepted to CVPR 2026 (Findings)!
• [Jan 2026] 1 paper accepted to ACM CHI 2026!
• [Sep 2025] 1 paper accepted to EMNLP 2025 (System Demonstrations)!
• [Aug 2025] 1 paper accepted to EMNLP 2025!

📄 Pre-prints

Preprint

Best of Both Worlds: Multimodal Reasoning and Generation via Unified Discrete Flow Matching

Onkar Susladkar, Tushar Prakash, Gayatri Deshmukh, Kiet A. Nguyen, Jiaxun Zhang, Adheesh Juvekar, Tianshu Bao, Lin Chai, Sparsh Mittal, Inderjit S. Dhillon, Ismini Lourentzou. Preprint.

Preprint

Where LLM Agents Fail and How They Can Learn from Failures

Kunlun Zhu*, Zijia Liu*, Bingxuan Li*, Muxin Tian*, Yingxuan Yang, Jiaxun Zhang, Pengrui Han, Qipeng Xie, Fuyang Cui, Weijia Zhang, Xiaoteng Ma, Xiaodong Yu, Gowtham Ramesh, Jialian Wu, Zicheng Liu, Pan Lu, James Zou, Jiaxuan You. Preprint.

📄 Publications

* denotes equal contribution

CVPR 2026 Findings

Counterfactual Segmentation Reasoning: Diagnosing and Mitigating Pixel-Grounding Hallucination

Xinzhuo Li*, Adheesh Juvekar*, Jiaxun Zhang, Xingyou Liu, Muntasir Wahed, Kiet A. Nguyen, Yifan Shen, Tianjiao Yu, Ismini Lourentzou. CVPR 2026 Findings.

ACM CHI 2026

Mental Health Impacts of AI Companions: Triangulating Social Media Quasi-Experiments, User Perspectives, and a Relational Lens

Yunhao Yuan, Jiaxun Zhang, Talayeh Aledavood, Renwen Zhang, Koustuv Saha. ACM CHI 2026.

EMNLP 2025

TinyScientist: An Interactive, Extensible, and Controllable Framework for Building Research Agents

Haofei Yu*, Keyang Xuan*, Fenghai Li*, Kunlun Zhu, Zijie Lei, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Kyle Richardson, Jiaxuan You. EMNLP 2025 System Demonstrations.

EMNLP 2025

SafeScientist: Enhancing AI Scientist Safety for Risk-Aware Scientific Discovery

Jiaxun Zhang*, Kunlun Zhu*, Ziheng Qi*, Nuoxing Shang, Zijia Liu, Peixuan Han, Yue Su, Haofei Yu, Jiaxuan You. EMNLP 2025.

🎓 Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego, 2026–present
• B.S. in Statistics & Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2022–2026

Awards

• Jacobs School of Engineering Fellowship, UCSD, 2026
• Fiddler Innovation Undergraduate Student Fellowship, UIUC, 2025
• Dean’s List — Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024, Spring 2025