Jiarui Liu

PhD Student in Language Technologies

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

Biography

I am a 2nd year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, co-advised by Professor Mona Diab at CMU and Professor Zhijing Jin at the University of Toronto. My research focuses on reasoning, continual learning, reinforcement learning, agents, and alignment for large language models.

I am currently a research intern at Meta in Redmond, hosted by Xin Luna Dong, Renjie Tao, and Tony Liao, working on accelerating ML research through harnesses and RL for research ideation. Previously, I interned at Amazon Rufus in Seattle in 2025, where I worked on honesty alignment for reasoning models; at Amazon AWS Bedrock in New York in 2024, where I studied multimodal hallucination; and at WarpEngine in Shanghai in 2023, where I built a personalized chatbot product.

At CMU, I am a teaching assistant for 11-768 AI Agents (Fall 2026, with Graham Neubig and Daniel Fried) and was a teaching assistant for 11-830 Ethics, Safety, and Social Impact in NLP and LLMs (Spring 2026, with Maarten Sap). I co-organized the PersonaNLP workshop at NeurIPS and the NLP for Positive Impact workshop in 2025, and I review for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, COLM, ACL ARR, and CHI.

Before CMU, I worked with Professors Rada Mihalcea and Zhijing Jin in the LIT group at the University of Michigan on NLP for social good. I have also had a great time working with Professor Wei Hu on improving worst-group robustness.

Interests

Reasoning
Continual learning
Reinforcement learning
Agents
Alignment

Education

PhD in Language Technologies, Aug 2025 - May 2028 (Expected)
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
Master of Language Technologies, Aug 2023 - May 2025
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh
BSE in Computer Science, Sept 2021 - May 2023
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sept 2019 - Aug 2023
Shanghai Jiao Tong University (UM-SJTU Joint Institute)

News📢

[Aug. 2026] I am a TA for 11-768 AI Agents at CMU this fall!
[Jul. 2026] Two papers received Best Paper Awards at the ICML 2026 RLxF Workshop!
[May. 2026] I started my research intern at Meta in Redmond!
[May. 2026] PaperMentor to appear in ACL 2026 Demo and CauSciBench to appear in ICML 2026!
[Jan. 2026] Two papers to appear in EACL 2026!
[Jan. 2026] I am a TA for 11-830 Ethics, Safety, and Social Impact in NLP and LLMs at CMU this spring!
[Dec. 2025] Invited talk at Nice-NLP on honest language models for deductive reasoning.
[Nov. 2025] Two papers to appear in EMNLP 2025, see you in Suzhou!
[May. 2025] I started my applied scientist intern at Amazon Rufus in Seattle!
[May. 2025] Four papers to appear in ACL 2025!
[Jan. 2025] One paper to appear in ICLR 2025!
[Dec. 2024] Best Paper Award at the NeurIPS 2024 Pluralistic Alignment Workshop!
[Sep. 2024] One paper to appear in EMNLP 2024, see you in Miami!
[May. 2024] I started my applied scientist intern at Amazon AWS!
[Mar. 2024] One paper to appear in NAACL 2024 as Oral Presentation!
[Jan. 2024] One paper to appear in ICLR 2024, see you in Vienna!

Publications

* indicates equal contribution.

"Learning from Use: Test-Time Learning in Large Language Models and Agents"

Weihao Xuan* , Qingcheng Zeng* , Jiarui Liu* , Rui Yang* , Yunze Xiao , Yinxi Li , Zeqi Zhou , Weiwei Sun , Heli Qi , Leyang Cui , Tianhao Ma , Hanqun Cao , Junjue Wang , Tianyu Liu , Weihua Du , Yueqi Song , Jiayi Geng , Matthew Yu Heng Wong , Rob Voigt , Chuan Hong , Xiang Yue , Jen-Tse Huang , Xuhai Xu , Yifan Peng , Pheng Ann Heng , Yiming Yang , Bernhard Schölkopf , Zhijing Jin , Nan Liu , Naoto Yokoya , Mona Diab

Preprint 2026

"Evaluating Multi-Turn Multimodal Diagnostic Reasoning on Challenging Real-World Clinical Cases"

Rui Yang , Weihao Xuan , Yi Lin , Zhuhan Bao , Jonathan Chong Kai Liew , Matthew Yu Heng Wong , Nicolás Lescano , Nikita R Paripati , Emily Ling-Lin Pai , Jiarui Liu , Heli Qi , Heng-Jui Chang , Benny Kai Guo Loo , Huitao Li , Kunyu Yu , Yufan Wang , Chuan Hong , Shijian Lu , Douglas Teodoro , Naoto Yokoya , Ross Koppel , Mona Diab , Hua Xu , David W Bates , Nan Liu , Yifan Peng

Preprint 2026

"PACE: A Proxy for Agentic Capability Evaluation"

Yueqi Song , Lintang Sutawika , Jiarui Liu , Lindia Tjuatja , Jiayi Geng , Yunze Xiao , Daniel Lee , Aditya Bharat Soni , Vincent Lo , Xiang Yue , Graham Neubig

Preprint 2026

"PaperMentor: A human-centered multi-agent writing tutor for AI research papers in Overleaf"

Jiarui Liu , Terry Jingchen Zhang , Ryan Faulkner , Xuanqiang Angelo Huang , Vilém Zouhar , Dominik Glandorf , Isabel Dahlgren , Rishit Dagli , Yuen Chen , Felix Leeb , Van Q Truong , Punya Syon Pandey , Yves Bicker , Suvajit Majumder , Wenyuan Jiang , Zeju Qiu , Sankalan Pal Chowdhury , Mrinmaya Sachan , Bernhard Schölkopf , Mona Diab , Zhijing Jin

ACL 2026 Demo

"OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation"

Xuhui Zhou , Weiwei Sun , Weihua Du , Jiarui Liu , Haojia Sun , Qianou Ma , Tongshuang Wu , Yiming Yang , Maarten Sap

Preprint 2026

"Re-Centering Humans in LLM Personalization"

Lechen Zhang , Jiarui Liu , Tal August

Preprint 2026

"Knowledge Index of Noah's Ark"

Sheng Jin , Minghao Liu , Yunze Xiao , Zeqi Zhou , Heli Qi , Yifan Yao , Meishu Song , Kaijing Ma , Xuan Zhang , Sicong Jiang , Yizhe Li , Ningshan Ma , Jie Wei , Ziniu Li , Minglai Yang , Bangya Liu , Yiming Liang , Xiao Fang , Qingcheng Zeng , Jiarui Liu , Rui Yang , Shen Yan , Wenhao Huang , Jiaheng Liu , Zihan Wang , Weihao Xuan , Ge Zhang

Preprint 2026

"LT2: Linear-Time Looped Transformers"

Chunyuan Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Yuanyuan Xu , Jiarui Liu , TS Ng , Hanjie Chen

Preprint 2026

"Reinforcing Human Behavior Simulation via Verbal Feedback"

Weiwei Sun , Xuhui Zhou , Jiarui Liu , Weihua Du , Haojia Sun , Yiqing Xie , Qianou Ma , Sihao Chen , Mengting Wan , Longqi Yang , Pei Zhou , Sherry Wu , Sean Welleck , Graham Neubig , Yiming Yang , Maarten Sap

Preprint 2026

"MixSD: Mixed Contextual Self-Distillation for Knowledge Injection"

Jiarui Liu , Lechen Zhang , Yongjin Yang , Yinghui He , Yingheng Wang , Weihao Xuan , Zhijing Jin , Mona Diab

Preprint 2026

"Transferability for General Reasoning: An Automated Curriculum for Multi-Domain RLVR"

Yongjin Yang , Jiarui Liu , Yinghui He , Lezhen Zhang , Bernhard Schölkopf , Zhijing Jin

Best Paper Award at ICML 2026 RLxF Workshop

"Self-distillation zero: Self-revision turns binary rewards into dense supervision"

Yinghui He , Simran Kaur , Adithya Bhaskar , Yongjin Yang , Jiarui Liu , Narutatsu Ri , Liam Fowl , Abhishek Panigrahi , Danqi Chen , Sanjeev Arora

Best Paper Award at ICML 2026 RLxF Workshop

"CLT-Forge: A Scalable Library for Cross-Layer Transcoders and Attribution Graphs"

Florent Draye , Abir Harrasse , Vedant Palit , Tung-Yu Wu , Jiarui Liu , Punya Syon Pandey , Roderick Wu , Terry Jingchen Zhang , Zhijing Jin , Bernhard Schölkopf

Preprint 2026

"Mind the sim2real gap in user simulation for agentic tasks"

Xuhui Zhou , Weiwei Sun , Qianou Ma , Yiqing Xie , Jiarui Liu , Weihua Du , Sean Welleck , Yiming Yang , Graham Neubig , Sherry Tongshuang Wu , Maarten Sap

Preprint 2026

"Making Complex Reasoning Student-Friendly: A Hybrid LLM-to-SLM Distillation Framework"

Yongjin Yang , Yinghui He , Jiarui Liu , Zhijing Jin

Preprint 2026

"Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning for Honesty Alignment in Language Models on Deductive Reasoning"

Jiarui Liu , Kaustubh Dhole , Yingheng Wang , Haoyang Wen , Sarah Zhang , Haitao Mao , Gaotang Li , Neeraj Varshney , Jingguo Liu , Xiaoman Pan

AAAI 2026 Bridge LMReasoning Workshop, AAAI 2026 MATH4AI Workshop

"LLM Microscope: What Model Internals Reveal About Answer Correctness and Context Use"

Jiarui Liu* , Jivitesh Jain* , Mona Diab , Nishant Subramani

COLM 2025 Interplay Workshop

"CauSciBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark on End-to-End Causal Inference for Scientific Research"

Sawal Acharya , Terry Jingchen Zhang , Andrew Kim , Anahita Haghighat , Sun Xianlin , Pepijn Cobben , Rahul Babu Shrestha , Maximilian Mordig , Jacob T. Emmerson , Furkan Danisman , Yuen Chen , Clijo Jose , Andrei Ioan Muresanu , Justin Cui , Jiarui Liu , Yahang Qi , Punya Syon Pandey , Yinya Huang , Bernhard Schölkopf , Mrinmaya Sachan

ICML 2026

"Taming Object Hallucinations with Verified Atomic Confidence Estimation"

Jiarui Liu , Weihao Xuan , Zhijing Jin , Mona Diab

EACL 2026

"CORE: Measuring Multi-Agent LLM Interaction Quality under Game-Theoretic Pressures"

Punya Syon Pandey , Yongjin Yang , Jiarui Liu , Zhijing Jin

EACL 2026

"Synthetic Socratic Debates: Examining Persona Effects on Moral Decision and Persuasion Dynamics"

Jiarui Liu , Yueqi Song* , Yunze Xiao* , Mingqian Zheng* , Lindia Tjuatja , Jana Schaich Borg , Mona Diab , Maarten Sap

EMNLP 2025 Main

"Humanizing Machines: Rethinking LLM Anthropomorphism Through a Multi-Level Framework of Design"

Yunze Xiao* , Lynnette Hui Xian Ng* , Jiarui Liu , Mona Diab

EMNLP 2025 Main Oral

"BIG5-CHAT: Shaping LLM Personalities Through Training on Human-Grounded Data"

Wenkai Li* , Jiarui Liu* , Andy Liu , Xuhui Zhou , Mona T. Diab , Maarten Sap

ACL 2025 Main

"Towards Global AI Inclusivity: A Large-Scale Multilingual Terminology Dataset (GIST)"

Jiarui Liu* , Iman Ouzzani* , Wenkai Li* , Lechen Zhang , Tianyue Ou , Houda Bouamor , Zhijing Jin , Mona Diab

ACL 2025 Findings

"Uncovering and Understanding Social Media Censorship across Countries"

Neemesh Yadav* , Jiarui Liu* , Francesco Ortu , Zhijing Jin , Rada Mihalcea

ACL 2025 Findings

"Chumor 2.0: Towards Benchmarking Chinese Humor Understanding"

Ruiqi He , Yushu He , Longju Bai , Jiarui Liu , Zhenjie Sun , Zenghao Tang , He Wang , Hanchen Xia , Rada Mihalcea , Naihao Deng

ACL 2025 Findings

"EmoNews: A Spoken Dialogue System for Expressive News Conversations"

Ryuki Matsuura* , Shikhar Bharadwaj* , Jiarui Liu* , Dhatchi Kunde Govindarajan

SigDial 2025 Demo

"Language Model Alignment in Multilingual Trolley Problems"

Zhijing Jin* , Max Kleiman-Weiner* , Giorgio Piatti* , Sydney Levine , Jiarui Liu , Fernando Gonzalez , Francesco Ortu , András Strausz , Mrinmaya Sachan , Rada Mihalcea , Yejin Choi , Bernhard Schölkopf

ICLR 2025 and Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2024 Pluralistic Alignment Workshop

"Implicit Personalization in Language Models: A Systematic Study"

Zhijing Jin* , Nils Heil* , Jiarui Liu* , Shehzaad Dhuliawala* , Yahang Qi* , Bernhard Schölkopf , Rada Mihalcea , Mrinmaya Sachan

EMNLP 2024 Findings

"Synatra: Turning indirect knowledge into direct demonstrations for digital agents at scale"

Tianyue Ou , Frank F Xu , Aman Madaan , Jiarui Liu , Robert Lo , Abishek Sridhar , Sudipta Sengupta , Dan Roth , Graham Neubig , Shuyan Zhou

NeurIPS 2024

"Inducing Elasticity in Foundation Models: Post-Training Techniques for Adaptable Inference"

Aashiq Muhamed , Jiarui Liu , Mona Diab , Virginia Smith

NeurIPS ENLSP Workshop 2024

"Chumor 1.0: A Truly Funny and Challenging Chinese Humor Understanding Dataset from Ruo Zhi Ba"

Ruiqi He , Yushu He , Longju Bai , Jiarui Liu , Zhenjie Sun , Zenghao Tang , He Wang , Hanchen Xia , Naihao Deng

Preprint 2024

"Automatic Generation of Model and Data Cards: A Step Towards Responsible AI"

Jiarui Liu , Wenkai Li , Zhijing Jin , Mona Diab

NAACL 2024 Oral

"Analyzing the Role of Semantic Representations in the Era of Large Language Models"

Zhijing Jin* , Yuen Chen* , Fernando Gonzalez* , Jiarui Liu , Jiayi Zhang , Julian Michael , Bernhard Schölkopf , Mona Diab

NAACL 2024

"Can Large Language Models Infer Causation from Correlation?"

Zhijing Jin* , Jiarui Liu* , Zhiheng Lyu , Spencer Poff , Mrinmaya Sachan , Rada Mihalcea , Mona Diab , Bernhard Schölkopf

ICLR 2024

"Bias Amplification Enhances Minority Group Performance"

Gaotang Li* , Jiarui Liu* , Wei Hu

TMLR 2023

"Voices of Her: Analyzing Gender Differences in the AI Publication World"

Yiwen Ding* , Jiarui Liu* , Zhiheng Lyu , Kun Zhang , Bernhard Schoelkopf , Zhijing Jin , Rada Mihalcea

ACL 2025 NLP for Positive Impact Workshop