Website Context

Owner and Positioning

This is the personal academic website of Xijia Tao (also Ciel; 陶熙佳), a PhD student in the HKUNLP lab at the University of Hong Kong. The public author profile lists Hong Kong as the location and links to Google Scholar, GitHub, LinkedIn, and X.

The homepage currently describes two active research themes:

• multimodal deep research / multimodal browsing agents
• diffusion large language models

The publication record also supplies context in agent skill compression, vision-language model safety, and multilingual transfer. These additional directions should remain visible through the publication list, but should not automatically be promoted into the short current-research statement.

Public Content Inventory

The homepage (_pages/about.md) is the canonical visitor-facing overview. It contains a short biography followed by a reverse-chronological publication list:

1. SoftSkill — behavioral compression for contextual adaptation; arXiv 2606.20333
2. Self-Distilled Trajectory-Aware Boltzmann Modeling — diffusion-language-model post-training; arXiv 2605.11854
3. Beyond Confidence — diffusion-language-model decoding; arXiv 2512.02044
4. MMSearch-Plus — multimodal browsing-agent benchmark; ICLR 2026 and arXiv 2508.21475
5. OmniPlay — omni-modal game-playing benchmark; arXiv 2508.04361
6. ImgTrojan — vision-language-model jailbreaking; NAACL 2025, ACL Anthology 2025.naacl-long.360
7. Language Versatilists vs. Specialists — multilingual transfer; arXiv 2306.06688

The homepage, not _publications/, is the primary publication list. _publications/ currently contains legacy generated detail records for ImgTrojan and Language Versatilists vs. Specialists; keep their metadata consistent when touching those papers.

Other public pages are mostly inherited Academic Pages scaffolding. The main navigation intentionally exposes only Blog Posts and CV. The CV page links to files/cv.pdf. There is no dedicated News or Projects section; project pages and repositories are linked as resources beneath publication entries.

Technical Shape

• Static site generator: Jekyll / GitHub Pages
• Theme lineage: Academic Pages on Minimal Mistakes
• Primary configuration: _config.yml
• Navigation: _data/navigation.yml
• Homepage: _pages/about.md
• Publication detail collection: _publications/
• Local media: images/ and files/
• Ruby build: bundle exec jekyll build
• JavaScript bundle: npm run build:js
• Production URL: https://xijia-tao.github.io

The theme and build stack are old but stable. Routine content maintenance must not become an unsolicited dependency, framework, or visual redesign project.

Audience and Editorial Voice

Primary visitors are academic researchers, potential collaborators, prospective students, and research-oriented recruiters. The desired style is:

• concise and factual
• minimal, professional, and researcher-oriented
• easy to scan on desktop and mobile
• neutral about claims and contributions
• free of startup language, inflated adjectives, decorative artwork, and heavy interaction

Preserve the friendly first-person opening and the owner’s use of the names “Ciel” and “陶熙佳.” Avoid time-fragile biography phrases such as a numbered PhD year unless the owner explicitly wants to maintain them.

Maintenance Boundaries

Safe routine changes include verified publication metadata, working resource links, typographical fixes, and small consistency improvements. Ask before changing research identity, navigation, personal contact details, profile photos, or the visual design. Never infer acceptances, awards, affiliations, author order, or publication status.