Sicong Jiang

Shot in Tamarindo, Costa Rica

Sicong Jiang

Building RSI Agents @ Google DeepMind | PhD @ McGill University

I am a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, focusing on Agentic Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI). Previously, as a Founding Scientist at Abaka AI, I directed evaluation research and architected large-scale agentic data & RL environment systems, delivering mission-critical datasets and infrastructure to several frontier AI labs.

True recursive self-improvement requires closing the loop between autonomous reasoning and rigorous verification. Toward this vision, I build foundational pillars across the agent stack: execution-grounded verifiers (Harbor-Index, VeriWeb) to prevent reward hacking, human-aligned reward models (EditReward) for scalable multimodal supervision, and tool-augmented reasoning (AgentThink) to ground real-world decisions. Ultimately, my mission is to engineer reliable, open-ended self-evolving intelligence.

Sep 2026
🚀 Continuing at Google DeepMind as a Research Scientist in late September, working on Gemini RSI.
Aug 2026
🎉 One paper accepted by WACV 2027. Check EvaDrive.
Jul 2026
🎉 Released Harbor-Index — one of the most challenging agentic benchmarks to date. Great teamwork!
Mar 2026
🚀 Excited to join Google DeepMind as a Research Intern to work on Self-Evolving Agents.
Feb 2026
🎉 Two papers accepted by CVPR 2026 (one Main + one Findings). Check ChartNet, EgoTL.
Jan 2026
🎉 One paper accepted by ICLR 2026. Check EditReward.
Nov 2025
🎉 One paper accepted (oral) by Bridge Program of AAAI 2026.
Aug 2025
🎉 One paper accepted by EMNLP 2025. Check AgentThink.
Aug 2025
🤝 Joined 2077AI-Foundation—thrilled to contribute to the AI open-source community!
Jul 2025
🚀 Joined Abaka AI as a Founding Scientist in Palo Alto, California.
Jul 2025
🎉 One paper accepted by ICCV 2025 Foundation Models for AD Workshop. Check VLA4AD Survey.
Feb 2025
🎉 One paper accepted by ICLR 2025 Trustworthy LLM Workshop. Check SparseAttack-LLM4TS.
Jan 2025
🎉 One paper accepted by AISTATS 2025. Check Attack-LLM4TS.

* indicates equal contribution. For the complete list, visit Google Scholar.

AI Agents, Benchmarks & Evaluation

Foundation Models: Robustness, Safety & Applications

London Area, United Kingdom · On-site
Research Scientist
Oct 2026 – Present · 1 mo

Working on Gemini RSI (Agentic Recursive Self-Improvement).

Research Intern
Mar 2026 – Oct 2026 · 8 mos

Self-Evolving Agents: Engineered execution-grounded RL architectures for autonomous self-improvement, enabling Gemini Flash-tier models to outperform Pro-tier baselines on competitive coding benchmarks.

Compute Distillation & Harness Co-Evolution: Internalized test-time scaling compute into policy weights via continuous RL, and built automated harness pipelines to harvest edge-case trajectories and eliminate reward hacking.

Founding Scientist
Aug 2025 – Feb 2026 · Palo Alto, CA, United States

Research: As a founding member of the Research team, I lead benchmarking and evaluation for agentic and multimodal LLMs. I led the EditReward (ICLR'26) project and co-developed large-scale benchmarks including SuperGPQA (NeurIPS'25), ChartNet (CVPR'26), EgoTL (CVPR'26) and VeriWeb.

Advanced Dataset & Pipeline Design: Led several zero-to-one pipeline builds—architecting and deploying high-difficulty dataset solutions and production pipelines from scratch across coding, IMO-level math, multimodal data, agentic trajectories, and RL environments. These datasets and pipelines are directly used for model training and evaluation for several frontier AI labs.

Core Contributor
Aug 2025 – Mar 2026

As a core contributor, conducting substantial research across benchmarks, datasets, and agent evaluation for the open-source community.

Agent Evaluation: Led research on agent evaluation and training datasets, focusing on long-horizon reasoning, tool use, and self-evolving agent capabilities.

Multimodal Image Datasets: Led multimodal dataset research for image generation, including preference data and evaluation frameworks for alignment and controllability.

Applied Scientist Intern
May 2025 – Aug 2025

Multimodal Data Pipelines: Built data pipelines and multi-stage QA systems for multimodal LLM projects, overseeing large-scale annotation workflows and label consistency.

Dataset Quality & Validation: Conducted analysis and validation to refine annotations and ensure robust datasets for LLM post-training.

Research Assistant
Jan 2022 – May 2025 · Montreal, QC, Canada

AgentThink (Agent Reasoning): Led a collaboration with Xiaomi and Tsinghua on tool-augmented reasoning for vision-language models in autonomous driving, achieving +54% answer accuracy on open-source models.

Adversarial LLM4TS: Developed a black-box attack framework and public benchmarks for LLM-based time-series forecasting, in collaboration with the Amazon Chronos and Nixtla teams.

Research Assistant
Aug 2019 – Dec 2020 · Atlanta, GA, United States

Multi-Agent RL Exploration: Developed a multi-agent search strategy combining MADDPG with frontier-based exploration, and built evaluation benchmarks for exploration efficiency.

Awards

2024 McGill Engineering Doctoral Award (MEDA)
2021 TISED Doctoral Recruitment Award (DRA), McGill University
2019 Outstanding Graduate of Liaoning Province; Most Influential Graduate, Northeastern University
2017 National 1st Prize, China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling
2017 1st Class Academic Scholarship, Northeastern University

Academic Service

Workshops Organizer

Conferences Reviewer

  • Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
  • International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
  • IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
  • International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
  • Conference on Language Modeling (COLM)
  • Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
  • Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
  • IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
  • IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC)

Journals Reviewer

  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
  • Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies (TRC)
  • IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS)

I enjoy music by Tyler, the Creator, SZA and Chappell Roan.

Sometimes I also listen to Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and 9m88.

My favorite influencer is Allywoo on RedNote.

Cat: Bobo, a golden shaded British Shorthair who is good at programming with buttons.

Bobo