Jerry Huang

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advised by Prof. Julia Hockenmaier. I’m interested in generative AI models grounded in real-world and physical world priors. During my Master’s, I was advised by Prof. Tong Zhang.

I’ve worked at: Modus · NewsBreak · VectorShift · Old Mission · Vertex · Optiver · Amazon

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Department of Computer Science, Ph.D. Student (Aug. 2024 - present)
Duke University, B.S. in Computer Science (Aug. 2018 - May 2022)

Selected Publications

ACL

Contextual Relevance: Modeling Context-Conditioned Relevance for Improving Document Reranking

Jerry Huang, Siddarth Madala, Cheng Niu, Julia Hockenmaier, Tong Zhang

ACL 2026 Main Conference

PDF Project Page

ACL

GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas

Yaowenqi Liu, BingXu Meng, Rui Pan, Jerry Huang, Tong Zhang

ACL 2026 Main Conference

PDF Project Page

EACL

RAG-RL: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via RL and Curriculum Learning

Jerry Huang, Siddarth Madala, Risham Sidhu, Cheng Niu, Hao Peng, Julia Hockenmaier, Tong Zhang

EACL 2026 Findings

PDF Project Page