Hi there! I'm Yuxuan Zhang, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, advised by Prof. Kelsey R. Allen (Senior Research Scientist, DeepMind). I'm also affiliated with the Vector Institute. I work closely with Prof. Wenhu Chen, Dongfu Jiang, Yubo Wang, and Ping Nie. My research interests span:
I make AI agents work in the real world: ClawBench for live web-agent evaluation (adopted by ByteDance Seed · Doubao; COLM 2026 WAB), RewardHarness for self-evolving agentic post-training (COLM 2026), and VidGround for grounded video understanding.
I'm open to collaborations and research chats. Reach out at
reacher [at] cs.ubc.ca ( WeChat works too).
Actively looking for research internships. Let's grab a coffee and have a chat!
ClawBench evaluates AI agents on 153 real-world tasks across 144 live platforms, from booking appointments to filing job applications. It runs on production websites and intercepts only the final submission, keeping evaluation safe without losing real-world complexity.
RewardHarness beats GPT-5 by 5.3 points on image-editing evaluation while using 0.05% of the EditReward data. It reframes reward modeling as context evolution: from 100 preference demonstrations it evolves a library of tools and skills.
COLM 2026
Blog Project arXiv Code HuggingFace
@article{zhang2026rewardharness,
title={RewardHarness: Self-Evolving Agentic Post-Training},
author={Zhang, Yuxuan and Du, Penghui and Li, Bo and Wei, Cong and Miao, Junwen and Zhang, Huaisong and Cai, Songcheng and Wang, Yubo and Jiang, Dongfu and Zhang, Yuyu and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08703},
year={2026}
}
COLM 2026 WAB
Adopted by ByteDance Seed · Doubao
Blog Project arXiv Code Dataset HuggingFace X
@article{zhang2026clawbench,
title={ClawBench: Can AI Agents Complete Everyday Online Tasks?},
author={Zhang, Yuxuan and Wang, Yubo and Zhu, Yipeng and Du, Penghui and Miao, Junwen and Lu, Xuan and Li, Zhuofeng and Qu, Xingwei and Guo, Zhengkang and Shen, Yuanzhe and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.08523},
year={2026}
}
Under Review
Project arXiv Code HuggingFace X
@article{zhang2026watch,
title={Watch before you answer: Learning from visually grounded post-training},
author={Zhang, Yuxuan and Hwang, EunJeong and Zhang, Huaisong and Du, Penghui and Jia, Yiming and Jiang, Dongfu and He, Xuan and Zhang, Shenhui and Nie, Ping and West, Peter and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.05117},
year={2026}
}
Open Source Benchmark · Contributor
Project Code Dashboard Tasks Docs Harbor Terminal-Bench
@misc{terminal-bench-science,
title = {{Terminal-Bench-Science: Evaluating AI Agents on Computational Workflows in the Natural Sciences}},
author = {{Terminal-Bench-Science Team}},
month = feb,
year = {2026},
url = {https://github.com/harbor-framework/terminal-bench-science}
}
Under Review
arXiv Code Dataset Model HuggingFace
@article{wang2026function,
title={Function-Aware Fill-in-the-Middle as Mid-Training for Coding Agent Foundation Models},
author={Wang, Yubo and Liang, Jiarong and Zhang, Yuxuan and Liu, Xuye and Wei, Cong and Zhang, Yuyu and Nie, Ping and Chen, Wenhu},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.12463},
year={2026}
}
Under Review
@article{yan2026openskill,
title={OpenSkill: Open-World Self-Evolution for LLM Agents},
author={Yan, Zhiling and Song, Dingjie and Zhang, Hanrong and Liang, Wei and Zhang, Yuxuan and Dai, Yutong and He, Lifang and Yu, Philip S and Xu, Ran and Li, Xiang and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.06741},
year={2026}
}
Under Review
@article{wang2026mira,
title={MIRA: Mid-training Rubric Anchoring for Source-Aware Data Selection},
author={Wang, Haowen and Du, Yaxin and Yang, Jian and Wu, Jiajun and Liu, Shukai and Zhang, Yuxuan and Wang, Pingjie and Chen, Siheng and Zheng, Tuney and Zhou, Ming and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30288},
year={2026}
}
Open Source · 1k+ stars
@software{song2026drclaw,
title = {Dr. Claw: An AI Research Workspace from Idea to Paper},
author = {Song, Dingjie and Zhang, Hanrong and Liu, Dawei and Liu, Yixin and
Li, Zongxia and Yuan, Zhengqing and Zhang, Siqi and Sun, Lichao},
year = {2026},
url = {https://github.com/OpenLAIR/dr-claw}
}
Under Review
@article{yao2026dr,
title={Dr. bench: A multidimensional evaluation for deep research agents, from answers to reports},
author={Yao, Yang and Wang, Yixu and Zhang, Yuxuan and Lu, Yi and Gu, Tianle and Li, Lingyu and Zhao, Dingyi and Wu, Keming and Wang, Haozhe and Nie, Ping and others},
year={2026}
}
COLM 2025
Project Paper Code Dataset Model Demo
@article{wang2025scholarcopilot,
title={Scholarcopilot: Training large language models for academic writing with accurate citations},
author={Wang, Yubo and Ma, Xueguang and Nie, Ping and Zeng, Huaye and Lyu, Zhiheng and Zhang, Yuxuan and Schneider, Benjamin and Lu, Yi and Yue, Xiang and Chen, Wenhu},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.00824},
year={2025}
}
ICLR 2025 Spotlight
@inproceedings{guan2025retri3d,
title={Retri3D: 3D Neural Graphics Representation Retrieval},
author={Guan, Yushi and Kwan, Daniel and Dandurand, Jean and Yan, Xi and Liang, Ruofan and Zhang, Yuxuan and Jain, Nilesh and Ahuja, Nilesh and Panneer, Selvakumar and Vijaykumar, Nandita},
booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
volume={2025},
pages={31771--31813},
year={2025}
}
TMLR 2026
Project Paper Code Dataset Model HF Space Twitter
@article{he2025videoscore2,
title={Videoscore2: Think before you score in generative video evaluation},
author={He, Xuan and Jiang, Dongfu and Nie, Ping and Liu, Minghao and Jiang, Zhengxuan and Su, Mingyi and Ma, Wentao and Lin, Junru and Ye, Chun and Lu, Yi and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.22799},
year={2025}
}
TMLR 2025
@article{yang2025structeval,
title={StructEval: Benchmarking LLMs' Capabilities to Generate Structural Outputs},
author={Yang, Jialin and Jiang, Dongfu and He, Lipeng and Siu, Sherman and Zhang, Yuxuan and Liao, Disen and Li, Zhuofeng and Zeng, Huaye and Jia, Yiming and Wang, Haozhe and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.20139},
year={2025}
}