Yi Ding (丁熠) | Purdue Computer Science PhD Student

About

Hi there! I'm a PhD student at Purdue University , Department of Computer Science, advised by Dr. Ruqi Zhang. I obtained my B.S. degree at the School of Mathematics, Tianjin University . Previously, I worked as a research assistant in the MLDM Lab's Multimodal Vision Processing (MVP) Group, under the guidance of Dr. Bing Cao.

Research Interests

LLM/VLM Post-Training
Reinforcement Learning, On-Policy Distillation, Reasoning, Self-Correction, and Self-Evolving.
Alignment and Reliability
Preference Alignment, Safety Alignment, Reliable Supervision, and Robustness.

Open to collaborations! Feel free to reach out if our research interests align.

News

Aug 2026
Our paper on on-policy self-adaptation (OPSA) was released.
May 2026
Two papers were accepted to ICML 2026.
Jan 2026
One paper was accepted by ICLR 2026.
Sep 2025
One paper was accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
Aug 2025
One paper was accepted by EMNLP 2025 Main Conference.
May 2025
Yi will give a talk about VLM safety at Shenlan School.
Apr 2025
Yi serves as reviewer for NeurIPS 2025.
Jan 2025
Our paper, dataset, and models about VLM Multi-Image Safety (MIS) are released.
Jan 2025
Our paper about MLLM safety alignment was accepted at ICLR 2025.
Sep 2024
Yi serves as reviewer for ICLR 2025.
Sep 2024
Our paper about dynamic image fusion without additional training was accepted at NeurIPS 2024.
Jul 2024
Yi will present a poster at ICML 2024, Hall C 4-9 #2817, Vienna, Austria.
May 2024
Our paper about multimodal fusion was accepted at ICML 2024.

Publications * equal contribution

Selected first/co-first-author papers and a collaborative technical report across two research directions.

Reasoning & Self-Improvement

Comparison of RLVR, OPD, OPSD, and OPSA training methods

Preprint 2026 #1 Hugging Face Daily Papers · Sep 1, 2026

Does On-Policy Distillation Really Distill? From Noisy Teacher to Self-Improvement

Yi Ding, Ruqi Zhang

Supervision-free self-improvement through on-policy self-adaptation.

Paper Code Project

ICML 2026

Learning Self-Correction in Vision–Language Models via Rollout Augmentation

Yi Ding, Ziliang Qiu, Bolian Li, Ruqi Zhang

Learning self-correction by augmenting reinforcement-learning rollouts.

Paper Code Project

NeurIPS 2025

Sherlock: Self-Correcting Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Yi Ding, Ruqi Zhang

Bootstrapping self-correction and self-improvement from limited supervision.

Paper Code Project

Multimodal Safety & Alignment

ICLR 2026

Rethinking Bottlenecks in Safety Fine-Tuning of Vision Language Models

Yi Ding*, Lijun Li*, Bing Cao, Jing Shao

Teaching vision-language models to reason about safety across multiple images.

Paper Code Project

Technical Report 2025

SafeWork-R1: Coevolving Safety and Intelligence under the AI-45° Law

Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, …, Yi Ding, and 100+ authors

Jointly improving safety and intelligence in multimodal reasoning.

Paper

ICLR 2025

ETA: Evaluating Then Aligning Safety of Vision Language Models at Inference Time

Yi Ding, Bolian Li, Ruqi Zhang

Training-free safety alignment for vision-language models at inference time.

Paper Code Project

Additional Publications

* Equal contribution.

Preprint 2026

Addressing Performance Saturation for LLM RL via Precise Entropy Curve Control

Bolian Li, Yifan Wang, Yi Ding, Anamika Lochab, Ananth Grama, Ruqi Zhang

Paper Code Demo

ICML 2026 · Position Paper

Modular Safety Guardrails Are Necessary for Foundation-Model-Enabled Robots in the Real World

Joonkyung Kim, Wenxi Chen, Davood Soleymanzadeh, Yi Ding, Xiangbo Gao, Zhengzhong Tu, Ruqi Zhang, Fan Fei, Sushant Veer, Yiwei Lyu, Minghui Zheng, Yan Gu

Paper

EMNLP 2025 · Main

Visual Contextual Attack: Jailbreaking MLLMs with Image-Driven Context Injection

Ziqi Miao*, Yi Ding*, Lijun Li, Jing Shao

Paper Code

NeurIPS 2024

Test-Time Dynamic Image Fusion

Bing Cao, Yinan Xia*, Yi Ding*, Changqing Zhang, Qinghua Hu

Paper Code

ICML 2024

Predictive Dynamic Fusion

Bing Cao, Yinan Xia*, Yi Ding*, Changqing Zhang, Qinghua Hu

Paper Code

GitHub

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Education

2025.08 — Present

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Purdue University

Advisor: Dr. Ruqi Zhang

2021.08 — 2025.06

B.S. in Mathematics, Tianjin University

Advisor: Dr. Bing Cao

Academic Services

Conference Reviewer

ICLR 2025, 2026 NeurIPS 2025, 2026 ICML 2026 ARR 2025