Baqiao Liu mostly works on generative AI.

Now

• World Labs Member of Technical Staff

Previously

• xAI (now part of SpaceX) Member of Technical Staff Sr. Engineer on Structured Outputsarchived snapshot — and, for the longest time, larped as Ushiromiya右　代　宮 Lion 理　御.¹
• Adobe Firefly, multimodal data

Profile

“a paragon.”

Haskell IRC, 2018

I started as an indie game dev, and by some weird coincidence got into generative AI. I polish things to death and am said to be quite versatile, traits perhaps brought from working solo on games, some of them minor award-winners. I previously happened to just use abstract interpretation to clean LLM data while at xAI, but my main job was not that.

In 2024, I won the Best Game category at Google’s Gemini API Developer Competition with Pen Apple.

My game making influence can be high-level summarized, in my own words, as:

最後に、この「同人ゲーム」系の影響を強く受けたPen Appleが賞を取れるなんて本当に嬉しいです。アメリカ的な「Indie Game」からも多少影響を受けていますが、むしろ日本の鮮やかな「同人文化」がアメリカのIT系コンペでも評価された証だと言えるかもしれません🙂。

EN I’m so happy that Pen Apple, a game that was heavily influenced by the ‘doujin game’ scene, was able to win an award. While it also drew some inspiration from American-style ‘indie games’, I see this as a testament to how Japan’s vibrant ‘doujin culture’ can be recognized even in an American tech competition 🙂.

These days I am more out of touch with the indie game community (life is hard!); I have grown old, but one day, just one day. Professionally, I am perhaps better known for my work on multimodal data; before that, I had the fortune of working with Tandy Warnow during my PhD.

I had stints in the RPG Maker sphere (under RuneBlaze and LBQ) and Touhou doujin music sphere (under LBQ, of the circle Mad Hatter Tea). You might know me from those periods.

Education

• PhD in Computer Science from UIUC (2024)
• BS in Computer Science from UNC (2020)

Awards

• Best Game, Google Gemini API Developer Competition
• Best Robustness Award, Adobe Research Code Quality Jam
• 2021 Tencent Game Jam for Youth, Silver Award, Green Track（2021腾讯高校游戏创意大赛绿色赛道银奖）

Elsewhere

Where others have catalogued the doujin years:

• THBWiki — LBQ, my Touhou doujin music profile (Chinese).
• TouhouDB — LBQ, discography as an arranger.

Footnotes

1. My main handle at xAI: I went by ushiromiya-lion, and appear in the XGrammar 2.0 acknowledgements as Ushiromiya右　代　宮 Lion 理　御, in memory of the the tragic characterUmineko spoilers. ↩