My Research

The goal of my research is to assist humans to better interact with AI systems for knowledge acquisition, decision making, and creative thinking.

Professional Experience

Google DeepMind

Senior Research Scientist • May 2024 — Present

  • Develop large language model agents with planning, reasoning, tool using, and self critiquing abilities.
  • Build infrastructure and prototypes for multi-agent research and applications.
  • Develop reinforcement learning receipts for better LLM post-training.

Google Research

Research Scientist & Senior Research Scientist • Sept. 2021 — Apr. 2024

  • Developed data-driven models for deep understanding of fresh content such as news articles and social media.

Google Research

Research Intern & Student Researcher • May 2020 — Dec. 2020

  • Developed a new text encoder pre-training strategy using multiple task-specific attention heads.

Microsoft Research

Research Intern • May 2019 — Aug. 2019

  • Developed a self-supervised taxonomy expansion method with position-aware graph neural networks.

LinkedIn

External Researcher • Sep. 2018 — Oct. 2019

  • Proposed a hypernymy discovery method to exploit the context granularity in a text-rich heterogeneous information network.

Google

Research SWE Intern • May 2017 — Aug. 2017

  • Developed a multi-task learning method for email search ranking with auxiliary query clustering.

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ( UIUC )

Ph.D. in Computer Science • Aug. 2016 — Oct. 2021

  • Overall GPA: 4.0/4.0
  • Member of Data Mining Group. Supervised by Professor Jiawei Han.
  • Received Brian Totty Graduate Fellowship at Computer Science Department.
  • Received Yunni & Maxine Pao Memorial Fellowship.

Shanghai Jiao Tong University ( SJTU )

B.S.E. in Computer Science and Technology • Sep. 2012 — Jun. 2016

  • Overall GPA: 3.92/4.0 (91.71/100)     Major GPA: 3.98/4.0 (93.78/100)     Rank: 1/78
  • Member of IEEE honor class, an elite program at SJTU which aims to nurture scientists in computer science, electrical and electronic technology, and information science based on MIT’s educational model.

Yale University

International Exchange Student • Jun. 2014 — Aug. 2014

  • One of 10 top students fully funded by notable alumnus Neil Shen.
  • Studied in the Intensive English Program at English Language Institute.
  • Earned “Certificate of Excellence” at Yale University.

Teaching Experience

UIUC CS512: Data Mining Principle

Teaching Assistant • Spring 2020

UIUC CS412: Introduction to Data Mining

Guest Lecturer • Spring 2019

SJTU CS119: Principles of Computer Algorithms

Teaching Assistant • Summer 2015

SJTU CS114: Programming and Data Structures

Teaching Assistant • Spring 2015

SJTU MA118: Mathematical Analysis I

Teaching Assistant • Fall 2013

Services

  • Area Chair: ACL (2023, 2024), EMNLP 2024
  • Conference PC & Reviewers: ICLR 2025, NeurIPS 2024, AAAI (2020-2023), ACL (2020, 2021), EMNLP (2019-2022), NAACL (2021, 2024), KDD (2018-2024), WebConf (2020-2024), WSDM (2018, 2022-2025), ECMLPKDD (2020, 2021, 2023)
  • Journal Reviewer: TKDE, TBD, TPAMI

Skills

  • Programming Languages: Python, C++, MATLAB, R, Mathematica
  • Deep Learning Platforms: PyTorch, TensorFlow 2, JAX
  • Tools: Git, Latex, Vim, Linux, Keynote, MS Offices, OmniGraffle