activity
20232026
most citedMaia-2: A Unified Model for Human-AI Alignment in Chess

3 citations · 3 across the 13 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

15 papers

cs.AI2026

Playing Dumb: How a Chess Transformer Simulates Users Across Skill Levels

Difan Jiao, George Eilender, Zhenwei Tang +1

Generative models increasingly simulate users at different skill levels in education and AI evaluation. Yet it remains unclear whether lower-skill behavior reflects less internal k…

cs.AI2026

Agent Safety From Within: Detecting Harmful Trajectories from LLM Internal States

Difan Jiao, Ashton Anderson

Language model agents can now perform sophisticated sequences of actions via tools and harnesses, which has increased the scope of the damage they can cause. Guard models, however,…

cs.CL2026

Emulate or Estimate? The Divergent Strengths of Base and Post-Trained Language Models for Opinion Simulation

Seth Grief-Albert, Jessica Bo, Difan Jiao +1

Large language models are increasingly used to simulate human opinions, but prior work reports conflicting results: some studies find promising alignment with human survey data, wh…

cs.LG2026

Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero

Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal +12

As language-model-based AI is increasingly deployed in autonomous settings, aligning its goals and values with those of humans becomes critical. Today, alignment, and the assistant…

cs.AI2026

Tandem Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Difan Jiao, Raghav Singhal, Robert West +1

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial gains in language-model reasoning. However, models fine-tuned with RLVR need not remain compatible with…

cs.IR2026

SafeGEO: Understanding Generative Engine Optimization Risks in Recommendation Agents

Qianfeng Wen, Yifan Simon Liu, Xin Liu +4

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) lets content owners rewrite web content to increase their visibility in generative systems. In recommendation agents, this creates a risk that…

cs.LG2026

MINER: Mining Multimodal Internal Representation for Efficient Retrieval

Weien Li, Rui Song, Zeyu Li +8

Visual document retrieval has become essential for accessing information in visually rich documents. Existing approaches fall into two camps. Late-interaction retrievers achieve st…

cs.AI2026

LLM Safety From Within: Detecting Harmful Content with Internal Representations

Difan Jiao, Yilun Liu, Ye Yuan +4

Guard models are widely used to detect harmful content in user prompts and LLM responses. However, state-of-the-art guard models rely solely on terminal-layer representations and o…

cs.LG2026

Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learning

Rohan Surana, Gagan Mundada, Xunyi Jiang +19

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central post-training tool for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). In these systems, the rollout, the trajec…

cs.AI2026

ThinkTwice: Jointly Optimizing Large Language Models for Reasoning and Self-Refinement

Difan Jiao, Qianfeng Wen, Blair Yang +2

We introduce ThinkTwice, a simple two-phase framework that jointly optimizes LLMs to solve reasoning problems and refine the answers, based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (G…

cs.LG2026

Understanding the Dynamics of Demonstration Conflict in In-Context Learning

Difan Jiao, Di Wang, Lijie Hu

In-context learning enables large language models to perform novel tasks through few-shot demonstrations. However, demonstrations per se can naturally contain noise and conflicting…

cs.AI2025

SEAM: Semantically Equivalent Across Modalities Benchmark for Vision-Language Models

Zhenwei Tang, Difan Jiao, Blair Yang +1

Evaluating whether vision-language models (VLMs) reason consistently across representations is challenging because modality comparisons are typically confounded by task differences…

cs.AI2025

Learning to Imitate with Less: Efficient Individual Behavior Modeling in Chess

Zhenwei Tang, Difan Jiao, Eric Xue +4

As humans seek to collaborate with, learn from, and better understand artificial intelligence systems, developing AIs that can accurately emulate individual decision-making becomes…

cs.AI2024★ 3 cited

Maia-2: A Unified Model for Human-AI Alignment in Chess

Zhenwei Tang, Difan Jiao, Reid McIlroy-Young +3

There are an increasing number of domains in which artificial intelligence (AI) systems both surpass human ability and accurately model human behavior. This introduces the possibil…

cs.LG2023

SPIN: Sparsifying and Integrating Internal Neurons in Large Language Models for Text Classification

Difan Jiao, Yilun Liu, Zhenwei Tang +3

Among the many tasks that Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized is text classification. Current text classification paradigms, however, rely solely on the output of the…