Dongfu Jiang (姜东甫)

University of Waterloo · Waterloo, Canada · Vector Institute;

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Ph.D. Student in Computer Science

Dongfu Jiang | 姜东甫

AI/NLP researcher working on LLMs, multimodal systems, evaluation, and agentic post-training.

University of Waterloo · Waterloo, Canada · Vector Institute;

  • LLM/VLM Post-Training
  • Multimodal Evaluation
  • Tool Use
  • Agentic RL

I am on the industrial job market for 2026!

Please feel free to reach out if you find my background a good fit for your organization.

CV

Research Experience at

About

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. I am affiliated with TIGER-Lab and the Vector Institute, where I am advised by Prof. Wenhu Chen. I expect to graduate in June 2026. Before Waterloo, I received my B.E. in Computer Science from Zhejiang University, where I was advised by Prof. Zhou Zhao.

My recent research experience includes NVIDIA ADLR in Santa Clara, the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, SeaAI in Singapore, and earlier collaboration with the University of Southern California. My work has been recognized with an Outstanding Paper Award at TMLR 2025 for Mantis and a Best Paper Finalist / Oral at CVPR 2024 for MMMU. Across these roles, I have worked on post-training, multimodal evaluation, and agentic systems, with several projects later adopted or cited by follow-up model, benchmark, and tooling efforts.

My research goal is to build multimodal language agents that can reason, use tools, and collaborate with humans in open-ended settings. More broadly, I am interested in turning capable foundation models into practical systems through stronger post-training methods, better benchmarks, and reusable research infrastructure. My recent research interests include:

I am actively looking for full-time positions in industry research or engineering. Feel free to reach out by email if my background looks relevant.

Recent News

All news
Aug 18, 2025 Starting my internship at Nvidia ADLR!
Jun 1, 2025 Anouncing VerlTool, see X post and Github. Paper coming soon.
May 20, 2025 Release General-Reasoner to elicit general reasoning ability beyond math!
Mar 8, 2025 🎉 Will join NVIDIA as an intern this summer! See you at Santa Clara.
Feb 3, 2025 We release 🂡 AceCoder and the SoTA reward model for coding!
Jan 22, 2025 🎉 MegaBench is accepted to ICLR 2025!
Nov 14, 2024 🎉 Mantis is accepted to TMLR 2024
Sep 26, 2024 🎉 GenAI-Arena and WildVision-Arena have been accepted to the NeurIPS 2024 D/B track!
Sep 19, 2024 🎉 VideoScore is accepted to the EMNLP 2024 main conference!
Jun 24, 2024 Started my internship at AI2 today!

Publications (*, + indicate equal contribution)

Google Scholar

2026

  1. Report
    Core Contributor
    Mar 2026
    Technical report, March 11, 2026
    super_v3_overview.jpeg
  2. Blog
    Zhuofeng Li*Dongfu Jiang*, Xueguang Ma, Haoxiang Zhang, Ping Nie, Yuyu Zhang, Kai Zou, Jianwen Xie, and 2 more authors
    Feb 2026
    Blog post, February 9, 2026
    open_researcher_overview.png
  3. Chi Ruan, Dongfu Jiang, Yubo Wang, and Wenhu Chen
    In The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, Feb 2026
    critique_coder.png

2025

  1. Arxiv
    Xuan He*Dongfu Jiang*, Ping Nie, Minghao Liu, Zhengxuan Jiang, Mingyi Su, Wentao Ma, Junru Lin, and 16 more authors
    In arxiv preprint, Sep 2025
    videoscore2.png
  2. Arxiv
    Dongfu Jiang*, Yi Lu*, Zhuofeng Li*, Zhiheng Lyu*, Ping Nie, Haozhe Wang, Alex Su, Hui Chen, and 4 more authors
    In arxiv preprint, Feb 2025
    verltool.png
  3. Jialin Yang*Dongfu Jiang*, Lipeng He, Sherman Siu, Yuxuan Zhang, Disen Liao, Zhuofeng Li, Huaye Zeng, and 12 more authors
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research, May 2025
    Journal to Conference Certificate at TMLR 2025
  4. Benjamin Schneider*Dongfu Jiang*Chao DuTianyu Pang, and Wenhu Chen
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research, May 2025
  5. ACL 2025
    Huaye Zeng*Dongfu Jiang*, Haozhe Wang, Ping Nie, Xiaotong Chen, and Wenhu Chen
    In arxiv preprint, Feb 2025
    acecoder.png
  6. Jiacheng Chen*, Tianhao Liang*, Sherman Siu*, Zhengqing Wang, Kai Wang, Yubo Wang, Yuansheng Ni, Ziyan Jiang, and 8 more authors
    In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, Feb 2025
    megabench_preview.png

2024

  1. Xuan He*Dongfu Jiang*, Ge Zhang, Max Ku, Achint Soni, Sherman Siu, Haonan Chen, Abhranil Chandra, and 11 more authors
    In Proceedings of EMNLP, Nov 2024
    videoscore.png
  2. Yujie Lu, Dongfu JiangWenhu Chen, William Yang Wang, Yejin Choi, and Bill Yuchen Lin
    In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks Track, Dec 2024
    wildvision.png
  3. Dongfu Jiang*, Max Ku*, Tianle Li*, Yuansheng Ni, Shizhuo Sun, Rongqi Fan, and Wenhu Chen
    In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks Track, Dec 2024
    genai-arena.png
  4. Dongfu Jiang, Xuan He, Huaye Zeng, Cong Wei, Max W.F. Ku, Qian Liu, and Wenhu Chen
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research, Dec 2024
    Outstanding Paper Award at TMLR 2025 (1 / 1539 selected)
    mantis_preview.png
  5. Max Ku, Dongfu Jiang, Cong Wei, Xiang Yue, and Wenhu Chen
    In Proceedings of ACL, Aug 2024
    viescore.png
  6. Dongfu Jiang*, Yishan Li*, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Bill Yuchen Lin, and Wenhu Chen
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), May 2024
    tigerscore_preview.png

2023

  1. Xiang Yue*, Yuansheng Ni*, Kai Zhang*, Tianyu Zheng*, Ruoqi Liu, Ge Zhang, Samuel Stevens, Dongfu Jiang, and 14 more authors
    In Proceedings of CVPR oral, Jun 2023
    Best Paper Finalist and Oral at CVPR 2024 (24 / 11,532 selected)
    mmmu_preview.png
  2. Dongfu Jiang, Xiang Ren, and Bill Yuchen Lin
    In Proceedings of ACL, Jul 2023
    llm_blender_preview.png

Experience

Full CV

Education

  • 2023 - 2026

    Ph.D. in Computer Science

    University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

    • Advised by Prof. Wenhu Chen, TIGER-Lab
    • Affiliate of the Vector Institute for AI
  • 2019 - 2023

    B.E. in Computer Science

    Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    • GPA 3.97 / 4.00
    • Advised by Prof. Zhou Zhao

Research Experience

  • Aug 2025 - Present

    Research Intern

    NVIDIA ADLR, Santa Clara, US

    • Agentic reinforcement learning for tool use
    • Contributing to post-training of Nemotron family of models
  • Jun 2024 - Sep 2024

    Research Intern

    Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, US

    • Active learning with verbalized human feedback
  • Feb 2024 - Sep 2025

    Research Associate

    SeaAI, Singapore (remote)

    • Worked on interleaved multi-image instruction tuning for multimodal language models
  • Mar 2022 - Mar 2023

    Research Intern

    University of Southern California, US (remote)

    • Worked on methods for ensembling large language models with ranking and generation-based fusion

Impact

Full CV
  • 2023 - 2026

    First / co-first works received broad online coverage, including MarkTechPost features on LLM-Blender, GenAI-Arena, OpenResearcher, and AceCoder.

  • 2024 - 2026

    MMMU has been cited by major multimodal model and benchmark works including Llama 3, LLaVA-OneVision, Cambrian-1, Kimi-VL, and Video-MME.

  • 2023 - 2026

    LLM-Blender has been cited by representative LLM systems and evaluation works including FrugalGPT, Prometheus 2, RewardBench, SimPO, and Mixture-of-Agents.

  • 2024 - 2026

    MANTIS has been cited by multimodal follow-up works including LLaVA-OneVision, LLaVA-NeXT-Interleave, Molmo / PixMo, InternVL3, and MMMU-Pro.

  • 2025 - 2026

    VerlTool has been cited by later agentic RL and tool-use works including DeepAgent, SkyRL, and AgentFlow.

  • 2026

    OpenResearcher's data has been adopted by NVIDIA's Nemotron family of models.

  • 2025

    AceCoder synthesized prompts were used in the coding RL data mixture of OLMo 3.

  • 2024 - 2026

    WildVision has been cited by follow-up multimodal evaluation and alignment works including LLaVA-Critic, InternVL3, InternVL3.5, and Mammoth-VL.