Peng "Richard" Xia (夏鹏)

I am a Ph.D. student at Department of Computer Science, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, advised by Prof. Huaxiu Yao. Before that, I was briefly enrolled (2023-2024) as a Ph.D. student at Monash University, advised by A/Prof. Zongyuan Ge. Formerly, I worked as a research intern at Deep Research Team, Tongyi Lab, Alibaba and Microsoft Research.

My research focuses on scaling Multimodal Intelligence through mid/post-training and data scaling. I focus on building multimodal agents equipped with complex tool interaction and long-term memory, ultimately striving towards autonomous self-evovling systems.

Email: richard.peng.xia AT gmail DOT com; pxia AT cs DOT unc DOT edu

 /   /   /   /   /   / 

profile photo

📸 Caught on camera by Tars in San Diego

News

  • Feb.2026: I will join Google as a student researcher in Sunnyvale for this summer! Feel free to reach out!

  • Jan.2026: Three papers were accepted by ICLR 2026 and MNPO was selected as an oral presentation.

  • Sept.2025: Tongyi DeepResearch was released , one paper was accepted by NeurIPS 2025 and selected as a spotlight presentation, and one paper was accepted by TMLR.

  • May.2025: One paper was accepted by ICML 2025.

  • Jan.2025: Three papers were accepted by ICLR 2025 and MMIE was selected as an oral presentation.

  • Dec.2024: Invited talk at Cohere For AI, one paper was accepted by COLING 2025, two papers were accepted by AAAI 2025.

  • Sept.2024: One paper was accepted by NeurIPS 2024 and one paper was accepted by EMNLP 2024.

  • Jul.2024: One paper was accepted by ECCV 2024.

  • Jun.2024: Two papers were accepted by MICCAI 2024 and one was early accepted.

  • Sept.2023: One paper was accepted by NeurIPS 2023.

  • Aug.2022: Share paper list about multi-modal learning in medical imaging.

Selected Publications (Full Publications)

SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning
Peng Xia, Jianwen Chen, Hanyang Wang, Jiaqi Liu, Kaide Zeng, Yu Wang, Siwei Han, Yiyang Zhou, Xujiang Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Zeyu Zheng, Cihang Xie, Huaxiu Yao
arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper] [Code]
Agent0: Unleashing Self-Evolving Agents from Zero Data via Tool-Integrated Reasoning
Peng Xia, Kaide Zeng, Jiaqi Liu, Can Qin, Fang Wu, Yiyang Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Huaxiu Yao
arXiv preprint, 2025. [Paper] [Code]
Tongyi DeepResearch Technical Report
Tongyi DeepResearch Team (including Peng Xia)
Technical Report, 2025. [Paper] [Code]
Skywork-R1V4: Toward Agentic Multimodal Intelligence through Interleaved Thinking with Images and DeepResearch
Skywork AI Multimodality Team (including Peng Xia)
Technical Report, 2025. [Paper] [Code]
SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agents
Jiaqi Liu*, Yaofeng Su*, Peng Xia, Siwei Han, Zeyu Zheng, Cihang Xie, Mingyu Ding, Huaxiu Yao
arXiv preprint, 2026. [Paper] [Code]
MDocAgent: A Multi-Modal Multi-Agent Framework for Document Understanding
Siwei Han, Peng Xia, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Sun, Yun Li, Hongtu Zhu, Huaxiu Yao
arXiv preprint, 2025. [Paper] [Code]
WebWatcher: Breaking New Frontiers of Vision-Language Deep Research Agent
Xinyu Geng*, Peng Xia*, Zhen Zhang*, Xinyu Wang, Qiuchen Wang, Ruixue Ding, Chenxi Wang, Jialong Wu, Yida Zhao, Kuan Li, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. [Paper] [Code]
MMedAgent-RL: Optimizing Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multimodal Medical Reasoning
Peng Xia, Jinglu Wang, Yibo Peng, Kaide Zeng, Xian Wu, Xiangru Tang, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li, Yan Lu, Huaxiu Yao
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026. [Paper] [Code]
MMedPO: Aligning Medical Vision-Language Models with Clinical-Aware Multimodal Preference Optimization
Kangyu Zhu*, Peng Xia*, Yun Li, Hongtu Zhu, Sheng Wang, Huaxiu Yao
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025. [Paper] [Code]
MMed-RAG: Versatile Multimodal RAG System for Medical Vision Language Models
Peng Xia, Kangyu Zhu, Hanran Li, Tianze Wang, Weijia Shi, Sheng Wang, Linjun Zhang, James Zou, Huaxiu Yao
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. [Paper] [Code]
MMIE: Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark For Large Vision-Language Models.
Peng Xia*, Siwei Han*, Shi Qiu*, Yiyang Zhou, Zhaoyang Wang, Wenhao Zheng, Zhaorun Chen, Chenhang Cui, Mingyu Ding, Linjie Li, Lijuan Wang, Huaxiu Yao
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. (Oral) [Paper] [Code] [Project Page]
AnyPrefer: An Automatic Framework for Preference Data Synthesis.
Yiyang Zhou*, Zhaoyang Wang*, Tianle Wang*, Shangyu Xing, Peng Xia, Bo Li, Kaiyuan Zheng, Zijian Zhang, Zhaorun Chen, Wenhao Zheng, Xuchao Zhang, Chetan Bansal, Weitong Zhang, Ying Wei, Mohit Bansal, Huaxiu Yao
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. [Paper]
RULE: Reliable Multimodal RAG for Factuality in Medical Vision Language Models
Peng Xia*, Kangyu Zhu*, Haoran Li, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li, Gang Li, Linjun Zhang, Huaxiu Yao
The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2024 [Paper] [Code] [Talk]
CARES: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Trustworthiness in Medical Vision Language Models
Peng Xia, Ze Chen, Juanxi Tian, Yangrui Gong, Ruibo Hou, Yue Xu, Zhenbang Wu, Zhiyuan Fan, Yiyang Zhou, Kangyu Zhu, Wenhao Zheng, Zhaoyang Wang, Xiao Wang, Xuchao Zhang, Chetan Bansal, Marc Niethammer, Junzhou Huang, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li, Jimeng Sun, Zongyuan Ge, Gang Li, James Zou, Huaxiu Yao
The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024 [Paper] [Code] [Project Page]

Invited Talks

  • Jan. 2026: MiroMind, Agent0 & Agent0-VL: Unleashing Self-Evolving Agents via Tool-Integrated Reasoning.

  • Jul. 2025: TechBeat, MMed-RAG: Versatile Multimodal RAG System for Medical Vision Language Models.

  • Apr. 2025: ICLR Oral Session, Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark For Large Vision-Language Models.

  • Dec. 2024: Cohere For AI, Reliable Multimodal RAG for Factuality in Medical Vision Language Models. [Video] [Cohere Event] [X/Twitter] [Linkedin]

  • Oct. 2024: School of Computer Science, Soochow University, Reliable Multimodal RAG in Medical Vision Language Models.

  • Oct. 2024: AI TIME, EMNLP Seminar, Reliable Multimodal RAG in Medical Vision Language Models.

  • Oct. 2024: NICE-NLP, EMNLP Seminar, Reliable Multimodal RAG in Medical Vision Language Models.


Press


Selected Honors & Awards

  • ICLR Oral Presentation (Top 1.8%), 2025, 2026

  • ICDM UGHS 2025 Rising Star Award & Best Poster Award, 2025

  • NeurIPS Spotlight Presentation (Top 5%), 2025

  • Stars of Tomorrow Excellent Intern Award, Microsoft Research, 2025

  • KDD 2025 Health Day Distinguished Vision Award, 2025

  • ICLR Travel Award, 2025

  • Third Place, Shanghai-HK Interdisciplinary Shared Tasks (Task 1), 2022

  • Second Price, The 3rd Huawei DIGIX AI Algorithm Contest, 2021


Academic Services

  • Area Chair: ACL Rolling Review (ARR) (2025)

  • Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS (2024,2025), NeurIPS D&B Track (2024,2025), ICML (2024,2025,2026), ICLR (2025,2026), CVPR (2025,2026), ICCV (2025), ACL Rolling Review (ARR) (2024,2025,2026), ECCV (2026), MICCAI (2024,2025), WACV (2025,2026), AAAI (2026), KDD (2026)

  • Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), Cell Patterns, Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS), Expert Systems with Applications (ESWA), Pattern Recognition (PR)

  • Student Volunteer: EMNLP (2024)

  • Workshop Co-Organizer: ICML 2025 Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models

Teaching

  • Teaching Assistant, DATA 110, School of Data Science and Society, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2026 Spring.

Flag Counter
© Peng Xia | Last updated: last update