Yifei Ming

Contact: alvinming5 [at] gmail [dot] com

Hi! I am a senior research scientist at Google. I work on research that advances Gemini’s agentic capabilities on open-ended, long-horizon, and economically valuable tasks, along with the ecosystem that supports them, such as agent harness, environment scaling, and self-evolution.

In the past, I worked on:

  • Post-training: training agents for tool use, long-context reasoning, deep research, and multi-turn interaction

  • Foundational research: understanding the capabilities and limits of LLM-based systems

  • Evaluation & inference scaling: building sandboxes, challenging benchmarks, and improving agentic workloads at test time

I am open to collaborations. We are also hiring self-motivated student researchers / research interns. If you are interested in the directions below, feel free to reach out.

Research directions

(1) Self-evolving agent. Agents can self-evolve by learning from past experience, but today’s trial-and-error process is largely heuristic-driven, time-consuming, prone to overfitting, and poorly supported by existing systems. What infrastructure and algorithms can support a continuously evolving agentic system?

(2) Long-horizon agent. Economically valuable tasks often require humans to work for a long time. When agents operate at that scale, they tend to fail in ways humans wouldn’t (e.g., poorly followed instructions, reward hacking, and context pollution), leading to saturating returns. How do we design scalable environments and agent harnesses that hold up over long horizons?

News

05/2026 Starting a new position as a Senior Research Scientist at Google
05/2024 Starting a new position as a Research Scientist at Salesforce
05/2024 Defended my Ph.D. thesis on Reliable Foundation Models in the Open World :mortar_board:
06/2023 Research intern at Microsoft Research working on spatial and mathematical reasoning for vision-language models.
05/2022 Research intern at Adobe working on multi-modal document understanding and robustness.
More News

Publications

  1. ICML
    MAS-Orchestra: Understanding and Improving Multi-Agent Reasoning Through Holistic Orchestration and Controlled Benchmarks
    Zixuan Ke, Yifei Ming, Austin Xu, Ryan Chin, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Prathyusha Jwalapuram, Jiayu Wang, Semih Yavuz, Caiming Xiong, and Shafiq Joty
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2026
    Code Paper
  2. ACL
    Hard2Verify: A Step-Level Verification Benchmark for Open-Ended Frontier Math
    Shrey Pandit, Austin Xu, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yifei Ming, Caiming Xiong, and Shafiq Joty
    In Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2026
    Paper
  3. ACL
    Discovering the Gems in Early Layers: Accelerating Long-Context LLMs with 1000x Input Token Reduction
    Zhenmei Shi, Yifei Ming, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yingyu Liang, and Shafiq Joty
    In Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2026
    Paper
  4. ICLR
    LiveResearchBench: A Live Benchmark for User-Centric Deep Research in the Wild
    Jiayu Wang*, Yifei Ming*, Riya Dulepet, Qinglin Chen, Austin Xu, Zixuan Ke, Frederic Sala, Aws Albarghouthi, Caiming Xiong, and Shafiq Joty
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026
    Code Paper
  5. NeurIPS
    Beyond Accuracy: Dissecting Mathematical Reasoning for LLMs Under Reinforcement Learning
    Jiayu Wang*, Yifei Ming*, Zixuan Ke, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty, Aws Albarghouthi, and Frederic Sala
    In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025
    Code Paper
  6. EMNLP Oral
    Demystifying Domain-adaptive Post-training for Financial LLMs
    Zixuan Ke, Yifei Ming, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Caiming Xiong, and Shafiq Joty
    In Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2025
    Best Paper Nomination
    Code Paper
  7. TMLR
    A Survey of Frontiers in LLM Reasoning: Inference Scaling, Learning to Reason, and Agentic Systems
    Zixuan Ke, Fangkai Jiao, Yifei Ming, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Austin Xu, Do Xuan Long, Minzhi Li, Chengwei Qin, Peifeng Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, and Shafiq Joty
    In Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) 2025
    Paper
  8. ACL
    Does Context Matter? ContextualJudgeBench for Evaluating LLM-based Judges in Contextual Settings
    Austin Xu, Srijan Bansal, Yifei Ming, Semih Yavuz, and Shafiq Joty
    In Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025
    Code Paper
  9. ACL
    Unsolvable Problem Detection: Robust Understanding Evaluation for Large Multimodal Models
    Atsuyuki Miyai, Jingkang Yang, Jingyang Zhang, Yifei Ming, Qing Yu, Go Irie, Yixuan Li, Hai Li, Ziwei Liu, and Kiyoharu Aizawa
    In Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025
    Code Paper
  10. TMLR
    Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey
    Atsuyuki Miyai, Jingkang Yang, Jingyang Zhang, Yifei Ming, Yueqian Lin, Qing Yu, Go Irie, Shafiq Joty, Yixuan Li, Hai Li, Ziwei Liu, Toshihiko Yamasaki, and Kiyoharu Aizawa
    In Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) 2025
    Paper
  11. ICLR
    FaithEval: Can Your Language Model Stay Faithful to Context, Even If "The Moon is Made of Marshmallows"
    Yifei Ming, Senthil Purushwalkam, Shrey Pandit, Zixuan Ke, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Caiming Xiong, and Shafiq Joty
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025
    Code Paper
  12. NeurIPS
    Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words? Delving Into Spatial Reasoning for Vision Language Models
    Jiayu Wang, Yifei Ming, Zhenmei Shi, Vibhav Vineet, Xin Wang, Yixuan Li, and Neel Joshi
    In Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024
    Paper
  13. ICML
    Understanding Retrieval-Augmented Task Adaptation for Vision-Language Models
    Yifei Ming, and Yixuan Li
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024
    Paper
  14. ICLR
    Unsolvable Problem Detection: Evaluating Trustworthiness of Vision Language Models
    Atsuyuki Miyai, Jingkang Yang, Jingyang Zhang, Yifei Ming, Qing Yu, Go Irie, Yixuan Li, Hai Li, Ziwei Liu, and Kiyoharu Aizawa
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models 2024
    Code Paper
  15. ICLR
    Provable Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Hypersphere
    Haoyue Bai*, Yifei Ming*, Julian Katz-Samuels, and Yixuan Li
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024
    Paper
  16. CPAL Oral
    Domain Generalization via Nuclear Norm Regularization
    Zhenmei Shi*, Yifei Ming*, Ying Fan*, Frederic Sala, and Yingyu Liang
    In Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL) 2023
    Paper
  17. EMNLP
    A Critical Analysis of Document Out-of-Distribution Detection
    Jiuxiang Gu*, Yifei Ming*, Yi Zhou, Jason Kuen, Vlad I Morariu, Handong Zhao, Nikolaos Barmpalios Ruiyi Zhang, Anqi Liu, Yixuan Li, Tong Sun, and Ani Nenkova
    In Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP Findings) 2023
    Paper
  18. IJCV
    How Does Fine-Tuning Impact Out-of-Distribution Detection for Vision-Language Models?
    Yifei Ming, and Yixuan Li
    In International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) 2023
    Paper
  19. ICLR
    How to Exploit Hyperspherical Embeddings for Out-of-Distribution Detection?
    Yifei Ming, Yiyou Sun, Ousmane Dia, and Yixuan Li
    In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023
    Code Paper
  20. NeurIPS
    Delving into Out-of-Distribution Detection with Vision-Language Representations
    Yifei Ming, Ziyang Cai, Jiuxiang Gu, Yiyou Sun, Wei Li, and Yixuan Li
    In Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022
    Code Paper
  21. NeurIPS
    SIREN: Shaping Representations for Detecting Out-of-distribution Objects
    Xuefeng Du, Gabriel Gozum, Yifei Ming, and Yixuan Li
    In Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022
    Code Paper
  22. NeurIPS
    Domain Generalization with Nuclear Norm Regularization
    Zhenmei Shi*, Yifei Ming*, Ying Fan*, Frederic Sala, and Yingyu Liang
    In Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS’W) DistShift Workshop 2022
    Paper
  23. EMNLP
    Utilizing Language-Image Pretraining for Efficient and Robust Bilingual Word Alignment
    Tuan Dinh, Jy-yong Sohn, Shashank Rajput, Timothy Ossowski, Yifei Ming, Junjie Hu, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, and Kangwook Lee
    In Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP Findings) 2022
    Code Paper
  24. ICML Oral
    POEM: Out-of-Distribution Detection with Posterior Sampling
    Yifei Ming*, Ying Fan*, and Yixuan Li
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2022
    Oral Presentation [Top 2%]
    Code Paper
  25. ICML
    Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors
    Yiyou Sun, Yifei Ming, Xiaojin Zhu, and Yixuan Li
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2022
    Code Paper
  26. ICML
    Are Vision Transformers Robust to Spurious Correlations?
    Soumya Suvra Ghosal, Yifei Ming, and Yixuan Li
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML’W), SCIS Workshop 2022
    Paper
  27. AAAI Oral
    On the Impact of Spurious Correlation for Out-of-distribution Detection
    Yifei Ming, Hang Yin, and Yixuan Li
    In The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2022
    Code Paper
  28. ICML Oral
    Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control with Posterior Sampling
    Ying Fan, and Yifei Ming
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2021
    Oral Presentation [Top 3%]
    Code Paper