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Xuying Ning

Ph.D. in Computer Science · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Hi! I am Xuying Ning (宁徐瑛). I am a CS PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advised by Prof. Jingrui He, and I also closely work with Prof. Hanghang Tong. Prior to this, I received my B.Eng. in Artificial Intelligence from Xi'an Jiaotong University, where I was enrolled in the Honors Youth Program at the age of 15 and the Artificial Intelligence Experimental Class. I also spent time as a visiting student at Columbia University in 2022. I had the privilege of working with Prof. Nanning Zheng and Prof. Qinghua Zheng.

I am particularly interested in enabling intelligent systems to perform long-horizon multimodal reasoning in real-world environments. Questions that I am excited about include:

How to enhance AI agents to solve complex tasks in open-world settings, by augmenting multimodal foundation models with long-horizon search, memory, and tool-use capabilities.
How to understand and push the reasoning limits of multimodal foundation models, enabling them to form structured abstractions and relational understanding from unstructured multimodal inputs.
How to build self-evolving agents that can adapt, personalize, and explore in open-ended environments, aligning with user needs while improving through interaction.

Selected Publications

Selected papers and preprints. See a fuller list on Google Scholar.

* denotes equal contribution.

2026
Code as Agent Harness
arXiv 2026

Xuying Ning, Katherine Tieu, Dongqi Fu, Tianxin Wei, Zihao Li, Yuanchen Bei, Jiaru Zou, Mengting Ai, Zhining Liu, Ting-Wei Li, Lingjie Chen, Yanjun Zhao, Ke Yang, Bingxuan Li, Cheng Qian, Gaotang Li, Xiao Lin, Zhichen Zeng, Ruizhong Qiu, Sirui Chen, Yifan Sun, Xiyuan Yang, Ruida Wang, Rui Pan, Chenyuan Yang, Dylan Zhang, Liri Fang, Zikun Cui, Yang Cao, Pan Chen, Dorothy Sun, Ren Chen, Mahesh Srinivasan, Nipun Mathur, Yinglong Xia, Hong Li, Hong Yan, Pan Lu, Lingming Zhang, Tong Zhang, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He

Paper Code

agent llm survey
MC-Search: Evaluating and Enhancing Multimodal Agentic Search with Structured Long Reasoning Chains
ICLR 2026 Oral (Top 1%)

Xuying Ning*, Dongqi Fu*, Tianxin Wei*, Mengting Ai, Jiaru Zou, Ting-Wei Li, Hanghang Tong, Yada Zhu, Hendrik Hamann, Jingrui He

Paper Code

agentic search multimodal llm
Evo-Memory: Benchmarking LLM Agent Test-time Learning with Self-Evolving Memory
arXiv 2025

Tianxin Wei, Noveen Sachdeva, Benjamin Coleman, Zhankui He, Yuarchen Bei, Xuying Ning, Mengting Ai, Yunzhe Li, Jingrui He, Ed H. Chi, Chi Wang, Shuo Chen, Fernando Pereira, Wang-Cheng Kang, Derek Zhiyuan Cheng

Paper Code

agent memory
Mem-Gallery: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Conversational Memory for MLLM Agents
ACL 2026 Main

Yuanchen Bei, Tianxin Wei, Xuying Ning, Yanjun Zhao, Zhining Liu, Xiao Lin, Yada Zhu, Hendrik Hamann, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong

Paper Code

agent multimodal memory
PaperMind: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs
ACL 2026 Findings

Yanjun Zhao*, Tianxin Wei, Jiaru Zou, Xuying Ning, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Simmi Rana, Wendy H. Yang, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He

Paper Code

agent multimodal
AdaFuse: Adaptive Ensemble Decoding with Test-Time Scaling for LLMs
ACL 2026 Main

Chengming Cui*, Tianxin Wei, Ziyi Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Zhichen Zeng, Zhining Liu, Xuying Ning, Duo Zhou, Jingrui He

Paper Code

llm reasoning
CoFiRec: Coarse-to-Fine Tokenization for Generative Recommendation
arXiv 2025

Tianxin Wei*, Xuying Ning*, Xuxing Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Yupeng Hou, Yan Xie, Shuang Yang, Zhigang Hua, Jingrui He

Paper Code

recommendation generative
2025
Graph4MM: Weaving Multimodal Learning with Structural Information
ICML 2025

Xuying Ning, Dongqi Fu, Tianxin Wei, Wujiang Xu, Jingrui He

Paper Code

multimodal graph
I²VAE: Interest Information Augmentation with Variational Regularizers for Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation
UAI 2025

Xuying Ning, Wujiang Xu, Tianxin Wei, Xiaolei Liu

Paper Code

recommendation
AlphaOne: Reasoning Models Thinking Slow and Fast at Test Time
EMNLP 2025 Main

Junyu Zhang, Runpei Dong, Han Wang, Xuying Ning, Haoran Geng, Peihao Li, Xialin He, Yutong Bai, Jitendra Malik, Saurabh Gupta, Huan Zhang

Paper Code

llm reasoning
SLMRec: Empowering Small Language Models for Sequential Recommendation
ICLR 2025

Wujiang Xu, Qitian Wu, Zujie Liang, Jiaojiao Han, Xuying Ning, Wenfang Lin, Linxun Chen, Feng Wei, Yongfeng Zhang

Paper Code

recommendation llm

Xuying Ning

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