Chen Zhao

Assistant Professor
Computer Science, NYU Shanghai

Affiliated Assistant Professor
Center for Data Science, New York University

567 West Yangsi Road, Shanghai, China

Email: cz1285 [at] nyu [dot] edu

I am an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science, NYU Shanghai (Starting at Fall 2023). I am also affiliated at Center for Data Science, New York University.
I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science, New York University, mentored by Prof. Kyunghyun Cho and Prof. He He. I am a member of the ML2 lab and the CILVR group.
I received my Ph.D. at the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Prof. Jordan Boyd-Graber and Prof. Hal Daumé III. Throughout my graduate studies, I spent several summers doing internships in industry, including Microsoft Semantic Machines, DMX group and IDEAS group at Microsoft Research.
My main research interest is in natural language processing. My goal is to equip intelligent agents (e.g., Language Models) with external tools to make them more reliable and interpretable in real scenarios. Some directions I'm mostly excited nowadays include:

(1) Reasoning-intensive Retrieval and augmented Generation: How to find and incorporate external knowledge into language models to satisfy complex user needs (e.g., find a code snippet or a theorem) that often require intensive reasoning capacities?

(2) Controllable Text Generation: How to generate text (e.g., provide long-form answer to a question) that satisfies interlocking constraints: being controllable and truthful?

(3) Understanding how Language Models aquire knowledge: How current language models internally aquire knowledge, and adopt quickly with new information (i.e. Knowledge Editing)?

(4) Human-centered NLP in Healthcare: How to have both language model and human in-the-loop to reliably solve real-world healthcare problems (e.g., Radiology Report Generation)?

I am looking for 1-2 PhD students to join the group this coming cycle (2024 - 2025), see my advising statement and the NYU Shanghai PhD program for details. I am also looking for predoctoral researchers and visiting researchers (start time could be flexible). If you are interested in working with me, please send me an email.

Papers

         

PhD Students

Yulin Chen (NYU CDS PhD, w/ He He)

Hongjun Liu (NYU CDS PhD)

Bale Chen (NYU Courant CS PhD)

Visitors

Siyue Zhang (PhD student at Nanyang Technological University )

Yiming Zhang (PhD student at Zhejiang University)

Alumni

Danielle Rothermel (NYU PhD, 2022.9 - 2024.1)

Yanda Chen (Columbia PhD -> Anthropic, 2022.6 - 2024.8)

Guan-de Wu (NYU PhD, 2022.6 - 2024.10)

Yilun Zhao (Yale Ms -> Yale PhD, 2022.10 - 2023.8)

Chenglei Si (UMD Undergrad -> Stanford PhD, 2020.9 - 2023.8)

My Career in Bridge

Besides doing NLP research, I am a professional-level bridge player. I have been playing for more than 12 years, and I deeply love this game. My long-term goal is to win the Bermuda Bowl (aka world championship) with China open team.

I am fortunate to partner with Jing Liu since 2016, one of the most talented player in the world and playing for the China national team. I am grateful to be mentored by Yu Zhang since 2011, and by multiple world champions Simon de Wijs and Bauke Muller since 2019.

In 2023, our team reached semi-final in Vanderbilt cup, North American Bridge Championships. It's the best result for Chinese teams ever. In 2018, I played for China junior Team for the 2018 World Junior Championship. In 2017, Jing Liu and I won a national title (IMP Pairs) in Kansas City.

Recent Achievements:

2023 Spring NABC (New Orleans USA). Finished in Semi-final in Vanderbilt, with Jing Liu, Linlin Hu, Dunga Liu and Hongji Wei.

2022 Spring NABC (Reno USA). Finished in round of 16 in Vanderbilt, with Simon de Wijs, Bauke Muller, Zia Mahmood and David Gold.

2021 Fall NABC (Austin USA). Finished in round of 32 in Soloway KO teams, with Steve Chen, Jian-Jian Wang, and Jun Shi.

2020 Minor ALT Invitational II (Bridge Base Online). Finished in second place, with Simon de Wijs, Bauke Muller, Choon Chou Loo, Gideon Tan, Ricco van Prooijen and Louk Verhees.

2019 Fall NABC (San Fransisco, USA). Finished in round of 16 in Soloway KO teams, with Jing Liu, Linlin Hu and Dunga Liu.

2019 Summer NABC (Las Vegas, USA). Finished in round of 32 in Spingold (lost to team Zimmerman), with Jing Liu, Linlin Hu and Dunga Liu.

2019 Spring NABC (Memphis, USA). 9th in Jocaby Open Swiss Teams, with Jing Liu, Simon De Wijs and Bauke Muller.

2018 World Series (Orlando, USA). 8th in Open Pairs, with Jing Liu.

2018 World Junior Championship (Wujiang, China). Finished in quarterfinal, with Qingfeng Wang, Benjie Miao, Sijia Gu, Kai Jin and Jinhao Dong.

2018 Spring NABC (Philadelphia, USA). Finished in quarterfinal in Vanderbilt, with Jing Liu, Hua Poon and Choon Chou Loo.

2017 Spring NABC (Kansas City, USA). Won IMP Pairs, with Jing Liu.