Education
Master of Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — GPA 3.91/4.0
Expected Dec 2027
B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — GPA 3.83/4.0
May 2025
Yihang Jiao
Hi! I'm Yihang Jiao, a Master of Computer Science student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I also received my B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science. Previously I was a research assistant at FOCAL Lab with Prof. Gagandeep Singh, working on the robustness of neural language models. Since 2024 I have also worked with Prof. Hongying Zan at Zhengzhou University on method-specific paper recommendation, registered at UIUC as CS 397.
My research interests lie in:
- AI for Bio: building models for biomedical data, where the labels are few and the cases that matter are rare.
- AI Safety: testing what language models do when someone is trying to break them on purpose, and whether the tests we use to measure that are themselves sound.
- AI Agents: building agents for concrete tasks, such as repairing bugs or finding the right paper, and then testing whether they work.
Most of my work has been about how these models are measured. I have built segmentation pipelines, retrieval systems, and red-teaming pipelines, and in each case the finding that mattered came from checking what the evaluation was actually measuring.