Jike Zhong

I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Southern California (USC). I work primarily with Prof. Konstantinos Psounis (he is fantastic!). My recent research focuses on multimodal and agentic reasoning, reinforcement learning fine-tuning, and foundation model evaluations.

Before PhD I spent a year with the data science team at Salesforce working on agentic LLMs. Prior to that I completed my Bachelor's with double majors in CS and Statistics at Ohio State University from 2019-2022. I was advised by great Prof. Wei-Lun Chao and Dr. Hong-You Chen. I have also spent some wonderful time at CCVL lab at Johns Hopkins University, supervised by Bloomberg Distinguished Prof. Alan Yuille.

I'm currently looking for summer 2027 internship opportunities, please feel free to reach out if you see a fit; I can be reached at jikezhon@usc.edu

Last update was in 09/2026.

Email  /  Google Scholar

• 2026-06: Joined Amazon AGI as a research intern in the AGI foundations group
• 2026-06: One paper on evaluating thinking-with-image (used by Qwen 3.5, Qwen 3.6 plus, etc.) accepted to ECCV '26
• 2026-04: One paper on theory-of-mind RL post-training (my internship work from last summer) accepted to ICML '26
• 2026-03: Two papers to appear in CVPRW 2026
• 2026-01: One paper accepted to IEEE TMI
• 2025-09: One paper on MLLM RLVR accepted to NeurIPS 2025 as Spotlight