Tianyang Liu

I’m on the 2026 industry job market. If your team works on evaluation or post-training, I’d love to hear from you. til040@ucsd.edu

Tianyang Liu

Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, UC San Diego

I build, train, and evaluate large language models, and try to make them smarter, stronger, and more tasteful. I’m advised by Julian McAuley, and before this I did my Master’s at UCSD with him and Zhiting Hu.

I’ve interned at NVIDIA, Amazon, and Snowflake. I’ve been super fortunate and grateful to be mentored by brilliant and generous people: Canwen Xu, Gaoyan Xie, Muhao Chen, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Xiaoyang Wang, and Zijian Wang.

Blog

7 essays
  1. 30 Sep 2026What Makes Generated UI Good?How we know a generated interface is actually good89 min · EN / 中
  2. 17 Sep 2026What Is Taste in Generated UI?What beauty and taste mean when models generate UI37 min · EN / 中
  3. 8 Sep 2026The Human Is Part of the AgentRethinking the Human’s Place in the Age of Agents40 min · EN / 中
  4. 28 Aug 2026Reinforcement Learning in LLMsFrom SFT to Policy Optimization124 min · EN / 中
  5. 12 Aug 2026What Is a GPU Doing With My Tensors?From tensor storage and computation to LLM inference, training, and communication49 min · EN / 中
  6. 23 Jul 2026Modern TransformersWhat changed after early GPT, and why those changes work130 min · EN / 中
  7. 26 May 2026What Is Linear Algebra Really Doing in LLMs?From representation, transformation, interaction, and scale to low-rank structure58 min · EN / 中

Papers

18 papers
  1. 2026

    CocoaBench: Evaluating Unified Digital Agents in the Wild

    Shibo Hao, Zhining Zhang, Zhiqi Liang, Tianyang Liu, Yuheng Zha, Qiyue Gao, Jixuan Chen, Zilong Wang, Zhoujun Cheng, Haoxiang Zhang,

    COLM

  2. Spider 2.0-AIFunc: Extending Real-World Text-to-SQL to AI-Native SQL Workflows

    Tianyang Liu, Canwen Xu, Fangyu Lei, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Jixuan Chen, Tao Yu, Julian McAuley, Zhewei Yao, and Yuxiong He

    preprint

  3. BigCodeArena: Unveiling More Reliable Human Preferences in Code Generation via Execution

    Terry Yue Zhuo, Xiaolong Jin, Hange Liu, Juyong Jiang, Tianyang Liu, Chen Gong, Bhupesh Bishnoi, Vaisakhi Mishra, Marek Suppa, Noah Ziems,

    COLM

  4. 2025

    You Don’t Know Until You Click: Automated GUI Testing for Production-Ready Software Evaluation

    Yutong Bian, Xianhao Lin, Yupeng Xie, Tianyang Liu, Mingchen Zhuge, Siyuan Lu, Haoming Tang, Jinlin Wang, Jiayi Zhang, Jiaqi Chen,

    preprint

  5. Revisiting Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning from A Cross-Domain Perspective

    Zhoujun Cheng*, Shibo Hao*, Tianyang Liu*, Fan Zhou, Yutao Xie, Feng Yao, Yuexin Bian, Yonghao Zhuang, Nilabjo Dey, Yuheng Zha,

    NeurIPS

  6. Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models

    Yanbin Yin, Kun Zhou, Zhen Wang, Xiangdong Zhang, Yifei Shao, Shibo Hao, Yi Gu, Jieyuan Liu, Somanshu Singla, Tianyang Liu,

    arXiv

  7. Code to Think, Think to Code: A Survey on Code-Enhanced Reasoning and Reasoning-Driven Code Intelligence in LLMs

    Dayu Yang*, Tianyang Liu*, Daoan Zhang*, Antoine Simoulin, Xiaoyi Liu, Yuwei Cao, Zhaopu Teng, Xin Qian, Grey Yang, Jiebo Luo, and Julian McAuley

    EMNLP (main)

  8. Symbolic Representation for Any-to-Any Generative Tasks

    Jiaqi Chen, Xiaoye Zhu, Yue Wang, Tianyang Liu, Xinhui Chen, Ying Chen, Chak Tou Leong, Yifei Ke, Joseph Liu, Yiwen Yuan, Julian McAuley, and Li-jia Li

    CVPR

  9. Imitate Before Detect: Aligning Machine Stylistic Preference for Machine-Revised Text Detection

    Jiaqi Chen*, Xiaoye Zhu*, Tianyang Liu*, Ying Chen, Xinhui Chen, Yiwen Yuan, Chak Tou Leong, Zuchao Li, Long Tang, Lei Zhang,

    AAAIOral Presentation

  10. 2024

    Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization Enables Tuning-free Self-Alignment of Language Models

    Somanshu Singla*, Zhen Wang*, Tianyang Liu, Abdullah Ashfaq, Zhiting Hu, and Eric P. Xing

    EMNLP (main)

  11. LLM Reasoners: New Evaluation, Library, and Analysis of Step-by-Step Reasoning with Large Language Models

    Shibo Hao*, Yi Gu*, Haotian Luo*, Tianyang Liu, Xiyan Shao, Xinyuan Wang, Shuhua Xie, Haodi Ma, Adithya Samavedhi, Qiyue Gao, Zhen Wang, and Zhiting Hu

    COLMAlso to appear at Large Language Model (LLM) Agents workshop at ICLR 2024

  12. StarCoder 2 and The Stack v2: The Next Generation

    Anton Lozhkov, Raymond Li, Loubna Ben Allal, Federico Cassano, Joel Lamy-Poirier, Nouamane Tazi, Ao Tang, Dmytro Pykhtar, Jiawei Liu, Yuxiang Wei, Tianyang Liu,

    technical report

  13. Rethinking Tabular Data Understanding with Large Language Models

    Tianyang Liu, Fei Wang, and Muhao Chen

    NAACL

  14. RepoBench: Benchmarking Repository-Level Code Auto-Completion Systems

    Tianyang Liu, Canwen Xu, and Julian McAuley

    ICLR

  15. 2023

    ToolkenGPT: Augmenting Frozen Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Embeddings

    Shibo Hao, Tianyang Liu, Zhen Wang, and Zhiting Hu

    NeurIPSOral (67 out of 12345 submissions), Best Paper Award at SoCal NLP 2023

  16. Architecture Decisions in AI-based Systems Development: An Empirical Study

    Beiqi Zhang, Tianyang Liu, Peng Liang, Chong Wang, Mojtaba Shahin, and Jiaxin Yu

    SANER

  17. RoseMatcher: Identifying the Impact of User Reviews on App Updates

    Tianyang Liu, Chong Wang, Kun Huang, Peng Liang, Beiqi Zhang, Maya Daneva, and Marten van Sinderen

    IST

  18. 2021

    The Role of User Reviews in App Updates: A Preliminary Investigation on App Release Notes

    Chong Wang*, Tianyang Liu*, Peng Liang, Maya Daneva, and Marten van Sinderen

    APSEC