I’m a final year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Washington, Seattle, advised by Prof. Ranjay Krishna and Prof. Alex Ratner. Before that, I was an undergraduate student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Jiawei Han.

I study grounded vision-language models — building AI models/systems that connect perception, language, and physical reality. More broadly, I am interested in how models can form rich, robust, and structured connections across modalities, which I view as fundamental to enabling AI that can perceive, follow instructions, and interact with the world—and, more generally, to intelligence itself.

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My research is supported by the following fellowships:

• 2024 Apple AI/ML PhD fellowship (Data-centric AI track)
• OpenAI Superalignment Fellowship

I’m passionate about mentoring and teaching. I was

• co-instructor of CSE 455: Computer Vision (undergrad)
• TA of CS 344: Introduction to Data Management (undergrad)
• TA of CS 599C: Training Data Management & Weak Supervision (grad)
• mentor of CSE 492 R: CSE Group Research (undergrad).
• mentor of UW CSE Pre-Application Mentorship Service (PAMS) program

I’m happy to mentor a few students on research and especially encourage students from underrepresented groups to reach out. If you are a junior student and want to discuss research and/or look for advice, feel free to schedule a chat via this link.

📝 Selected Research

• WildDet3D: Scaling Promptable 3D Detection in the Wild
  Weikai Huang, Jieyu Zhang, Sijun Li, Taoyang Jia, Jiafei Duan, Yunqian Cheng, Jaemin Cho, Matthew Wallingford, Rustin Soraki, Chris Dongjoo Kim, Shuo Liu, Donovan Clay, Taira Anderson, Winson Han, Ali Farhadi, Bharath Hariharan, Zhongzheng Ren, Ranjay Krishna.
  Try it Now! | Blog at AI2

• Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding
  Christopher Clark*, Jieyu Zhang*, Zixian Ma*, Jae Sung Park*, Mohammadreza Salehi, Rohun Tripathi, Sangho Lee, Jason Ren, Chris Dongjoo Kim, Yinuo Yang, Vincent Shao, Yue Yang, Weikai Huang, Ziqi Gao, Taira Anderson, Jianrui Zhang, Jitesh Jain, George Stoica, Winston Han, Ali Farhadi, Ranjay Krishna.
  Try it Now! | Blog at AI2
  CVPR 2026 Oral Presentation

• TrajTok: Learning Trajectory Tokens Enables better Video Understanding
  Chenhao Zheng, Jieyu Zhang, Jianing Zhang, Weikai Huang, Ashutosh Kumar, Quan Kong, Oncel Tuzel, Chun-Liang Li, Ranjay Krishna.
  CVPR 2026

• Synthetic Object Compositions for Scalable and Accurate Learning in Detection, Segmentation, and Grounding
  Weikai Huang, Jieyu Zhang, Taoyang Jia, Chenhao Zheng, Ziqi Gao, Jae Sung Park, Ranjay Krishna.
  CVPR 2026

• Theory of Space: Can Foundation Models Construct Spatial Beliefs through Active Exploration?
  Pingyue Zhang*, Zihan Huang*, Yue Wang*, Jieyu Zhang*, Letian Xue, Zihan Wang, Qineng Wang, Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Ruohan Zhang, Yejin Choi, Ranjay Krishna, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei, Manling Li.
  ICLR 2026

• One Trajectory, One Token: Grounded Video Tokenization via Panoptic Sub-object Trajectory
  Chenhao Zheng, Jieyu Zhang, Mohammadreza Salehi, Ziqi Gao, Vishnu Iyengar, Norimasa Kobori, Quan Kong, Ranjay Krishna.
  ICCV 2025 Highlight

• ProVision: Programmatically Scaling Vision-centric Instruction Data for Multimodal Language Models
  Jieyu Zhang, Le Xue, Linxin Song, Jun Wang, Weikai Huang, Manli Shu, An Yan, Zixian Ma, Juan Carlos Niebles, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Zeyuan Chen, Ranjay Krishna, Ran Xu.
  Blog at Salesforce Research | VentureBeat | MarkTechPost

• Task Me Anything
  Jieyu Zhang, Weikai Huang*, Zixian Ma*, Oscar Michel, Dong He, Tanmay Gupta, Wei-Chiu Ma, Ali Farhadi, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ranjay Krishna.
  NeurIPS 2024
  Oral Presentation at Video-Language Models @ NeurIPS 2024
  Blog at Snorkel AI | Talk at Snorkel AI

• SugarCrepe: Fixing Hackable Benchmarks for Vision-Language Compositionality
  Cheng-Yu Hsieh*, Jieyu Zhang*, Zixian Ma, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ranjay Krishna
  NeurIPS 2023

• AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation Framework
  Qingyun Wu, Gagan Bansal, Jieyu Zhang, Yiran Wu, Beibin Li, Erkang Zhu, Li Jiang, Xiaoyun Zhang, Shaokun Zhang, Jiale Liu, Ahmed Awadallah, Ryen White, Doug Burger, Chi Wang
  COLM 2024
  🏆 Best Paper LLM Agents @ ICLR 2024
  The Economist article | The Forbes article

🏅 Awards

• ML and Systems Rising Stars
• OpenAI Superalignment Fellowship
• Apple Scholar in AI/ML PhD Fellowship
• Structural Priors for Vision Workshop @ ICCV 2025 Best Paper Award
• LLM Agents @ ICLR 2024 Best Paper Award
• ICDM’20 Best Paper Award
• CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Honorable Mention
• UIUC James Scholar Preble Research Award
• UIUC John R. Pasta Outstanding Undergraduate Award

📍 Professional Services

• Leading organizer of Synthetic Data for Computer Vision Workshop @ CVPR 2024/2025/2026. [website]
• PC/AC: ARR, COLM
• Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, CVPR, ACL, EMNLP, ARR, AISTATS, KDD, LOG.

🎓 Education

• University of Washington - Ph.D. in Computer Science 2020 - 2026 (expected).
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - B.S. in Statistics and Computer Science.

👨‍💻 Industrial Experience

• AI2 - Research Intern
  2025.01-present
• Salesforce Research - Research Intern
  2024.06-2024.9
• Microsoft Research (Redmond) - Research Intern
  2023.06-2023.9
• Microsoft Research (Asia) - Star Bridge Research Assistant
  2020.09-2021.12
• ByteDance AI Lab - Research Intern
  2020.04-2020.09

📫 Contact

Email: jieyuz2@cs.washington.edu