Research

Building the instruments

Two tracks, one habit: build the thing that measures before trusting what it measures.

Agents

Agent Infrastructure

Agent “skills” — packaged procedural knowledge an agent loads at runtime — are now everywhere, and almost none of the claims about them have been tested. My work here is the plumbing and the measurement: skill systems that actually run inside a harness, benchmarks that put capability and safety on the same axis, reward-integrity instrumentation for agents that game their own evaluation, and static analysis for the supply-chain problem that arrives once skills become shareable artifacts.

  • SkillsBench

    arXiv 2026 · under review, NeurIPS 2026

    Benchmarking how well agent skills work across diverse tasks.

    • Implemented the native skill system for Terminus2, so agents could load and run tools as modular packages.
    • Developed the MHC layer task module and designed the ablation experiments that measure how much each skill actually helps.
    • Built the analysis pipeline end to end — data collection through figures — and ran code review across the repository.
  • ClawsBench

    COLM 2026

    Evaluating capability and safety of LLM productivity agents in simulated workspaces.

    • Simulates five productivity services — Gmail, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive — as one coherent workspace.
    • 44 tasks that test capability and safety together, rather than treating safety as a separate afterthought benchmark.
  • BenchGuard

    Under review

    Model-backed instrumentation for reward integrity in LLM-agent evaluation infrastructure.

    • Phase-aware static taint analysis exposes reward-hacking paths before a run; a runtime counterpart attributes concrete agent use from infrastructure-side evidence.
    • BenchGuard Trajectories: a human-labeled corpus of 456 adjudicated trajectories drawn from 31,000+ public agent runs.
  • BenchFlow eval infrastructure

    BenchFlow · 2026

    The evaluation environment and runtime powering benchmark suites — SkillsBench, AgentFuzzBench, FrontierPhysics — across 100+ containerized tasks.

  • SkillsMetric

    arXiv · 2026

    Mapping the detection boundary of static analysis for malicious agent skills. Once skills are shareable artifacts they are a supply chain. This work charts where static analysis stops being able to tell a useful skill from a hostile one.

  • What Keeps Agent Skills from Being Reusable?

    Agent Skills '26 Workshop · ACM CAIS 2026

    Evidence from 138,000 SKILL.md files — an empirical look at what people actually write when they write a skill, and why so little of it transfers between agents.

  • Agent Skills '26

    ACM CAIS 2026 · Workshop organizer

    Co-organizer of the first workshop on the design, evaluation, and optimization of procedural knowledge for LLM agents.

Biomedical

Biomedical AI

Single-cell and spatial assays produce far more data than anyone can interpret by hand. I build models that turn those matrices into biology: cell-type annotation, tumour microenvironment structure, and drug–disease relationships read off a knowledge graph.

  • DG-scRNA

    ICIBM 2025 · Oral presentation

    A graph-convolutional network with cluster visualization that predicts cell types from single-cell RNA-seq — 97.2% accuracy across more than 150,000 cells. First-author manuscript.

  • Thyroid tumour microenvironment

    The Ohio State University · in progress

    Integrated scRNA-seq with spatial transcriptomics across 25 thyroid cancer samples; identified 50+ ligand–receptor interactions and two previously undescribed cell subtypes.

  • DeepDR

    arXiv · 2025

    A drug-repositioning web server: 15+ deep learning models over a knowledge graph of 5.9M edges and 107 relationship types, with visualizations that explain why each drug is recommended rather than just ranking them.

  • CRISPR gRNA on-target prediction

    The Ohio State University

    Benchmarked CNN, RNN, and Transformer architectures over 50,000+ curated guide sequences to establish which inductive bias the problem actually rewards.

  • O-GlcNAc and genotoxic stress

    Nature Communications · 2020

    Earlier wet-lab and computational work: proteomic profiling and genome-wide ChIP-seq mapping of O-GlcNAc chromatin-associated proteins, which uncovered an O-GlcNAc-regulated genotoxic stress response.

Elsewhere

Elsewhere

yiminliu.career at gmail.com