Yi Lu | Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto

About Me

I am a recent graduate from the University of Toronto’s Master of Science in Applied Computing programme. My research interests lies in LLM/MLLM Post Training, Reinforcement Learning, and Agentic Systems.

Currently I am working as a part-time research intern at Texas A&M University under the supervision of Prof. Yu Zhang, with the topic of LLM Agents. During my master’s study, I served as a full-time co-op applied research intern at ModiFace (L’Oréal’s AI Lab) focusing on controllable video generation. Prior to that, I worked as a part-time research intern in TIGER Lab under the supervision of Prof. Wenhu Chen focused on Agentic-RL based Tool-calling LLMs. I was fortunate to work under the supervision of the wonderful Jiawang Cao and Wenbo Zhu during my research internship at Opus AI Research, where I worked on Multimodal Reasoning and MLLM Benchmarking, with two papers published in top conferences.

Research Interests

LLM/MLLM Reinforcement Learning
Agentic Post Training
Multimodal Understanding

News

Jun. 2026

🎉 Verltool is accepted by TMLR 2026.
Apr. 2026

🎉 Two papers are accepted by ACL 2026.
Dec. 2025

🔥 VerlTool has reached 800+ stars on Github.
Nov. 2025

🚀 Started my part-time research internship at Texas A&M University.
Oct. 2025

🔥 VerlTool has reached 600+ stars on Github. It's becoming a key infrastructure for Tool-Augmented Agent RL Post Training.
Sep. 2025

🎉 One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2025 NextVid Workshop.
Aug. 2025

🤫 VerlTool's tech report (co-first author) is released.
Jul. 2025

🏆 Achieved #1 on Multilingual Video Reasoning Evaluation Challenge @CVPR 2025.
May. 2025

🎉 One paper is accepted by ACL 2025.
Feb. 2025

🎉 One paper is accepted by CVPR 2025.
Dec. 2024

🎉 One paper is accepted by AAAI 2025.
Oct. 2024

🏆 Achieved #1 on Long-Term VideoQA Challenge of LOVEU Workshop @CVPR 2024.

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Publications

ACL

ReviewGrounder: Improving Review Substantiveness with Rubric-Guided, Tool-Integrated Agents

Zhuofeng Li*, Yi Lu*, Dongfu Jiang, Haoxiang Zhang, Yuyang Bai, Chuan Li, Yu Wang, Shuiwang Ji, Jianwen Xie, Yu Zhang

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026.

PDF Code Main Conference

TMLR

VerlTool: Towards Holistic Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Tool Use

Dongfu Jiang*, Yi Lu*, Zhuofeng Li*, Zhiheng Lyu, Ping Nie, Haozhe Wang, Alex Su, Hui Chen, Kai Zou, Chao Du, Tianyu Pang, Wenhu Chen

Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2026.

PDF Code 980+ ⭐ on GitHub

ACL

RSVP: Reasoning Segmentation via Visual Prompting and Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought

Yi Lu*, Jiawang Cao*, Yongliang Wu*, Bozheng Li, Licheng Tang, Yangguang Ji, Chong Wu, Jay Wu, Wenbo Zhu

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025.

PDF Main Conference

CVPR

VEU-Bench: Towards Comprehensive Understanding of Video Editing

Bozheng Li, Yongliang Wu*, Yi Lu*, Jiashuo Yu, Licheng Tang, Jiawang Cao, Wenqing Zhu, Yuyang Sun, Jay Wu, Wenbo Zhu

IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025.

PDF Highlight

AAAI

Video Repurposing from User Generated Content: A Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark

Yongliang Wu*, Wenbo Zhu*, Jiawang Cao*, Yi Lu, Bozheng Li, Weiheng Chi, Zihan Qiu, Lirian Su, Haolin Zheng, Jay Wu, Xu Yang

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2025.

PDF Code

Experiences

Research Intern @ Texas A&M University

Nov. 2025 - Present
Research Intern @ TIGER Lab @ University of Waterloo

Mar. 2025 - Dec. 2025
Applied Research Intern @ ModiFace (L'Oréal's AI Lab)

May. 2025 - Dec. 2025
Applied Research Intern @ Opus AI Research

Jan. 2025 - May. 2025
Machine Learning Engineer @ OpusClip

Apr. 2024 - Jan. 2025
Data Scientist Intern @ ByteDance

Aug. 2023 - Dec. 2023

Services

Conference Reviewers

The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2026

Last Updated: June 2026