Davis, CA, US
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Twitter I am an Assistant Professor of the Computer Science Department at UC Davis. Prior to joining UC Davis, I was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech and a core member of the Sanghani AI Center. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UIUC where I worked with Heng Ji.
My research centers on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, with a keen interest in developing efficient models and benchmarks to foster machine intelligence at a human level. My research aims to continually acquire precise knowledge from the ever-changing, open world through large-scale weak supervision, endow machines with generalizable, robust and efficient intelligence, and significantly enhance human experience when interacting with the technologies. My recent research interests are the fundamentals, understanding, enhancing, and forward-looking of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with broad downstream applications in NLP and Multimodal domains.
I'm always looking for highly motivated students to work with me on broad NLP and Multimodal research. Please feel free to reach out and apply!
News and Highlights
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(01/05/25): We have successfully hosted a series of Agentic AI for Scientific Discovery workshop at AAAI Spring Symposium, ICLR'2025, and WWW'2025! Recordings of some wonderful keynote talks are being released soon.
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(01/05/25): Two papers accepted by ICML'2025 and one accepted by TMLR! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.
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(05/03/25): Received the Best Paper Award from the AI4Search workshop at AAAI'2025.
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(04/03/25): Successfully hosted a series of AI4Search workshop at IJCAI'2024 and AAAI'2025.
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(22/01/25): Two papers accepted by NAACL'2025 main track and two are accepted at the Demo track! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.
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(22/01/25): Three papers accepted by ICLR'2025! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.
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(09/20/24): Six papers accepted by EMNLP'2024! Congrats to all the students and collaborators.
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(07/01/24): Glad to share that our lab has moved to UC Davis!
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(05/17/24): Four papers accepted by ACL'2024! Congrats to Zhiyang, Ying, Zihao and all collaborators.
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(04/01/24): Honored to receive the Outstanding New Assistant Professor award from the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech.
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(03/23/24): Serving as a Senior Area Chair for EMNLP'2024.
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(03/13/24): Three papers accepted by NAACL'2024. Congrats to Minqian, Sijia, Pritika and all collaborators.
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(02/25/24): Congrats to Zhiyang, Minqian, Jingyuan, Zihao, and Sijia on receiving internship offers from Meta AI, Microsoft Research, IBM Research, Adobe Research, and Amazon AWS Research Lab (NYC).
(02/15/24) : Glad to receive a new NSF award supporting our research on Conversational AI for Combating Cybergrooming.
(02/12/24) : Grateful to receive a new grant from DARPA FoundSci to support our research on foundation models for novel material design.
(01/18/24) : One paper about attribute-aware multimodal entity linking is accepted by EACL'2024. Congrats to Barry and all collaborators.
(5/1/23) : We have 5 papers accepted by ACL'23! Congrats to Zhiyang, Ying, Minqian, Sijia and all collaborators!
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(3/28/23): Very grateful to receive the NSF CAREER Award!
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(3/10/23): Congrats to Zhiyang, Minqian and Ying on receiving internship offers from Amazon Alexa AI, AWS Research Lab (NYC) and Apple Research.
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(12/18/22): Serving as a publication committee co-chair of ACL'2023, SAC of ACL'2023, AC of EMNLP'2023, and SPC of IJCAI'2023.
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(10/28/22): We are grateful to receive a gift fund from Google and Intuit.
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(10/26/22): Our team - HokieBot is selected as one of the 9 university teams for the Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5. We are grateful for all the support from Amazon Alexa.
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(9/30/22): Talk at USC AI Seminar: "Towards Open World Event Extraction with Weak Supervision".
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(8/15/22): Our work on Incremental Prompting for Continual Event Detection is accepted by COLING'22. Congrats to Minqian!
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(8/1/22): Serving as Area Chair (AC) for COLING'2022.
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