About

Hey there!

I'm Yujie Zhao, a third-year Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Jishen Zhao in Computer Science and Engineering Department of UC San Diego, starting in 2024. Before coming to UCSD, I received my B.S. degree in Applied Physics at University of Science and Technology of China.

I used to be an undergraduate research intern in EIC Lab at GaTech under the supervision of Professor Yingyan (Celine) Lin and Yang (Katie) Zhao. Previously I have also done research about RL theory under the supervision of Professor Huazheng Wang.

My research focuses on building agents from language to physics: self-evolving and efficient agent systems that reason, learn, and adapt across both digital and physical environments. Feel free to contact me if you share these interests!

Recent Research Interests

Self-Evolving Agent Systems
Digital and Physical Agents

Internships

Google Apr. 2026 – Sep. 2026

Student Researcher, Auto System Evolution

Mentor: Sheng Li
Intel Jun. 2025 – Sep. 2025

Research Intern, AI Team

Mentors: Ke Ding, Yang Wang

News

Our paper HiddenRAG was accepted to ICCAD 2026.
Our collaborative paper VideoScience-Bench was accepted to ECCV 2026.
Released our paper MetaAgent-X on end-to-end reinforcement learning for automatic multi-agent systems.
One first-author paper AMA-Bench accepted to ICML 2026.
Selected as a 63rd DAC Young Fellow.
Joined Google as a Student Research Intern.
One first-author paper Pro-V-R1 accepted to DAC 2026.
One first-author paper Stronger-MAS accepted to ICLR 2026.
Excited to release our PettingLLMs for multi-agent reinforcement learning training framework — check it out and give it a try!
Completed three-month research internship at Intel AI Team.
One first-author paper accepted to DAC 2025.
One first-author paper accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
One first-author paper accepted to DAC 2024.

Publications

* denotes equal contribution. Also on Google Scholar.

AMA-Bench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Memory for Agentic Applications

Yujie Zhao, Boqin Yuan, Junbo Huang, Haocheng Yuan, Zhongming Yu, Haozhou Xu, Lanxiang Hu, Abhilash Shankarampeta, Zimeng Huang, Wentao Ni, Yuandong Tian, Jishen Zhao

ICML 2026

Paper | Website | Code | Dataset | Leaderboard
MetaAgent-X: Breaking the Ceiling of Automatic Multi-Agent Systems via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning

Yaolun Zhang*, Yujie Zhao*, Nan Wang, Yiran Wu, Jiayu Chang, Yizhao Chen, Qingyun Wu, Jishen Zhao, Huazheng Wang

Under Review, 2026

Paper
HiddenRAG: Minimizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation Latency via In-Storage Processing

Zhongzhi Yu, Yujie Zhao, Sixu Li, Yujie Wang, Chaojian Li, Amrit Khera, Shruti Belgali, Yang (Katie) Zhao, Yingyan (Celine) Lin

ICCAD 2026
PRO-V-R1: Reasoning Enhanced Programming Agent for RTL Verification

Yujie Zhao, Zhijing Wu, Boqin Yuan, Zhongming Yu, Hejia Zhang, Wentao Ni, Chia-Tung Ho, Haoxing Ren, Jishen Zhao

DAC 2026

Paper | Code
Stronger-MAS: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Collaborative LLMs

Yujie Zhao, Lanxiang Hu, Yang Wang, Minmin Hou, Hao Zhang, Ke Ding, Jishen Zhao

ICLR 2026

Paper | Code
AgentKVShift: Efficient KV Cache Reuse for Agentic Memory Systems

Nilesh Prasad Pandey, Jason Kong, Lanxiang Hu, Quanling Zhao, Yujie Zhao, Onat Gungor, Hao Zhang, Tajana Rosing

NeurIPS 2026

Paper
JetSpec: Breaking the Scaling Ceiling of Speculative Decoding with Parallel Tree Drafting

Lanxiang Hu, Zhaoxiang Feng, Yulun Wu, Haoran Yuan, Yujie Zhao, Yu-Yang Qian, Bojun Wang, Peng Zhao, Daxin Jiang, Yibo Zhu, Tajana Rosing, Hao Zhang

arXiv 2026

Paper
Multi-Agent Memory from a Computer Architecture Perspective: Visions and Challenges Ahead

Zhongming Yu, Naicheng Yu, Hejia Zhang, Wentao Ni, Mingrui Yin, Jiaying Yang, Yujie Zhao, Jishen Zhao

ASPLOS 2026 Workshop

Paper
Benchmarking Scientific Understanding and Reasoning for Video Generation using VideoScience-Bench

Lanxiang Hu, Abhilash Shankarampeta, Yixin Huang, Zilin Dai, Haoyang Yu, Yujie Zhao, Haoqiang Kang, Daniel Zhao, Tajana Rosing, Hao Zhang

ECCV 2026

Paper | Code
MAGE: A Multi-Agent Engine for Automated RTL Code Generation

Yujie Zhao*, Hejia Zhang*, Hanxian Huang, Zhongming Yu, Jishen Zhao

DAC 2025

Paper | Code
OrcaLoca: An LLM Agent Framework for Software Issue Localization

Zhongming Yu*, Hejia Zhang*, Yujie Zhao, Hanxian Huang, Matrix Yao, Ke Ding, Jishen Zhao

ICML 2025

Paper | Code
RA-PbRL: Provably Efficient Risk-Aware Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning

Yujie Zhao, Jose Aguilar Escamilla, Weyl Lu, Huazheng Wang

NeurIPS 2024

Paper | Code
3D-Carbon: An Analytical Carbon Modeling Tool for 3D and 2.5D Integrated Circuits

Yujie Zhao, Yang Zhao, Cheng Wan, Yingyan (Celine) Lin

DAC 2024

Paper | Code

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