I joined Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) Department at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) in 2024 as an Assistant Professor. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science Department, UIUC, advised by Prof. Jiawei Han. After that, I visited UW as a researcher and worked with Prof. Hanna Hajishirzi. Prior to UIUC, I received my Bachelor Degree in Electronic Engineering in Tsinghua University in 2018. My research interest broadly lies in the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning, and I am especially interested in understanding the properties of language models as well as improving their trustworthiness and efficiency.

I am looking for PhD students and interns! If you are interested in working with me, please fill in this form. Check out this page for more details!

Recent Research Interests

• Training and Inference Efficiency of Large Language Models: I work on improving language model training and inference efficiency, see our recent work on test-time scaling, speculative decoding and long in-context learning.
• Large Language Model Reasoning: I investigate how large language model reasoning capabilities on text (unsupervised self-improving reasoning, weakly-supervised reasoning) and vision tasks (crossword puzzles).
• Large Language Model Alignment: I work on improving language model calibration to align their confidence with performance, see our recent work on reward calibration in RLHF.
• Large Language Model Factuality: I build methods for integrating factual knowledge within language models, including graphs(1), ontologies(1,2,3), entities(1,2), and applying them for downstream tasks(1) in low-resource setting.
• Data Efficiency for Language Model Training: I study how to better fine-tune language model with limited training data, including data self-generation(1,2,3), denoising distant-supervision and integrating metadata.
• Representation Learning: I study how the text embedding space could be regularized in different circumstances (category-based, joint-categories learning, contextualized, etc.)

Honors and Awards

Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship 2021-2023
C.W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Award
Chirag Foundation Graduate Fellowship
Outstanding Graduates, Tsinghua University 2018
Academic Excellence Scholarship, Tsinghua University 2015-2017
China National Scholarship (Top 1%) 2016
Samsung Scholarship 2015

Education

• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2018.08-2023.12)
  Ph.D. in Computer Science
  Research Interest: Natural Language Processing, Data Mining
  Advisor: Prof. Jiawei Han

• Tsinghua University (2014.08-2018.07)
  B. Eng. in Electronic Engineering
  Advisor: Prof. Yong Li

• University of California, Los Angeles (2017.07-2017.09)
  CSST summer program
  Advisor: Prof. Wei Wang