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News

[2024.3]. 2 papers accepted to NAACL 2024.

[2024.2]. 1 paper accepted to CVPR 2024.

[2024.2]. Will serve as an Area Chair/Action Editor for ACL/ARR.

[2024.1]. 2 papers accepted to ICLR 2024.

[2023.10]. 2 papers accepted to EMNLP 2023.

[…]. ……

Bio

I’m a second-year CS Ph.D. student at UIUC. I’m advised by Prof. Heng Ji and I also collaborate with Prof. Hao Peng. The long-term goal of my research is to build aligned and interactive AI systems to address challenges that remain unresolved even for human capabilities. To achieve this goal, my current research primarily concentrates on multimodal and large language models, aiming to establish fundamental approaches to address the following challenges:

• Alignment: How to train AI systems to follow human intents and values?
• Interaction: How to train AI systems to effectively interact with external entities (e.g., tools, humans) in the environment to facilitate the acquisition of information and language feedback?
• Supervision: How to train and evaluate AI systems that surpass the capabilities of human counterparts?

In my undergraduate years, I was a research intern at THUNLP advised by Prof. Zhiyuan Liu. In the early stages of my research, I worked closely with Dr. Fanchao Qi and received great help from him. Also, I am delighted to work with Prof. Wei Wei and Prof. Dawn Song.

I’m excited about the discussion and collaboration! Feel free to drop me an email if you are interested or have questions about my work.

Selected Publications

[Full Publications]

^* indicates equal contribution

• Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agents [paper]
  Xingyao Wang, Yangyi Chen, Lifan Yuan, Yizhe Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Hao Peng, Heng Ji
  Arxiv

• DRESS: Instructing Large Vision-Language Models to Align and Interact with Humans via Natural Language Feedback [paper]
  Yangyi Chen, Karan Sikka, Michael Cogswell, Heng Ji, Ajay Divakaran
  CVPR 2024

• CRAFT: Customizing LLMs by Creating and Retrieving from Specialized Toolsets [paper]
  Lifan Yuan^*, Yangyi Chen^*, Xingyao Wang, Yi R. Fung, Hao Peng, Heng Ji.
  ICLR 2024

• Measuring and Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models [paper]
  Yangyi Chen, Karan Sikka, Michael Cogswell, Heng Ji, Ajay Divakaran.
  NAACL 2024

• A Close Look into the Calibration of Pre-trained Language Models [paper]
  Yangyi Chen^*, Lifan Yuan^*, Ganqu Cui, Zhiyuan Liu, Heng Ji.
  ACL 2023

• Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP [paper]
  Yangyi Chen^*, Hongcheng Gao^*, Ganqu Cui, Fanchao Qi, Longtao Huang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun.
  EMNLP 2022

Education

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Ph.D. in Computer Science; 2022-Present

• Huazhong University of Science and Technology, BS in Software Engineering; 2018-2022

Experience

• SRI International@New Jersey, Research Intern; May-Aug 2023; Hosted by Dr. Karan Sikka, Dr. Michael Cogswell, and Dr. Ajay Divakaran.

Service

Area Chair/Action Editor

2024: ACL/ARR (Feb)

Reviewer

2024: COLM, ICML

2023: ICLR, EMNLP, EMNLP Industry Track, NeurIPS, NeurIPS D&B Track, ARR (Feb, Apr, Jun, Aug, Oct, Dec), ACL (Outstanding Award), IEEE T-IFS

2022: NeurIPS D&B Track, EMNLP, ARR (Dec)

Assistant: AAAI 2022, ARR 2022 (Jan), EMNLP 2021, ARR 2021 (Oct, Nov)

Personal

When I was young (around 20), I enjoyed playing the piano and basketball. When I started doing research, my interests changed and I quickly fell in love with food and soap operas. But always, I am a big fan of milk tea!!