Xinran Zhao

I am a first-year PhD student at CMU LTI, advised by Prof. Sherry Wu.

I did my MSCS at Stanford University, where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Christopher Manning.

I did my bachelors at HKUST. At HKUST and during my exchange at Cornell, I was fortunate to work with Prof. Yangqiu Song, Prof. Dit-Yan Yeung, and Prof. Claire Cardie.

My previous research topics include: few-shot learning, commonsense reasoning, coreference resolution, knowledge graph, and argument mining.

I love to discuss new ideas related to or beyond these topics. Do email me to start a chat.

Email  /  CV  /  Linkedin  /  GitHub  /  Google Scholar

profile photo
Research

I am interested in working on meaningful research on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. My goal is to build efficient, effetive and faithful systems to tackle the great ambiguity of natural languages.

Some interesting directions I am thinking of:
(1) Developing an efficient retrieval-augmented language model (RALM) system that can handle complex real tasks;
(2) Developing constraint-following systems with language models and external augmentation for complex planning;
(3) Developing efficient and effective model evaluation with compositional data, interactive tasks, and zero-shot signals

peer-reviewed
1. Thrust: Adaptively Propels Large Language Models with External Knowledge
Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao, Dong Yu, and Jianshu Chen
In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2023
2. Video State-changing Object Segmentation
Xiang Li, Jiangwei Yu, Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, and Yu-Xiong Wang
In Proceedings of ICCV 2023.
3. Towards Reference-free Text Simplification Evaluation with a BERT Siamese Network Architecture
Xinran Zhao, Esin Durmus, and Dit-Yan Yeung
In Findings of ACL 2023.
4. Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models (BIG-bench)
Aarohi Srivastava et al (100+ authors), Xinran Zhao
In TMLR
5. On Measuring the Intrinsic Few-Shot Hardness of Datasets
Xinran Zhao*, Shikhar Murty*, and Christopher Manning (*: equal contribution)
In Proceedings of EMNLP 2022.
6. Weakly Supervised Text Classification using Supervision Signals from a Language Model
Ziqian Zeng, Weimin Nie, Tianqing Fang, Xiang Li, Xinran Zhao, and Yangqiu Song
In Findings of NAACL 2022. [details] 
7. PCR4ALL: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Pronoun Coreference Resolution
Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, and Yangqiu Song
In Proceedings of LREC 2022. [paper] /  [details] 
8. Leveraging Topic Relatedness for Argument Persuasion
Xinran Zhao, Esin Durmus, Hongming Zhang, and Claire Cardie
In Findings of ACL 2021. [details] 
9. Probing Toxic Content in Large Pre-Trained Language Models
Nedjma Ousidhoum, Xinran Zhao, Tianqing Fang, Yangqiu Song, and Dit-Yan Yeung
In Proceedings of ACL 2021. [details] 
10. WinoWhy: A Deep Diagnose of Essential Commonsense Knowledge for Answering Winograd Schema Challenge
Hongming Zhang*, Xinran Zhao*， and Yangqiu Song (*: equal contribution)
In Proceedings of ACL 2020.
[paper] /  [code & data] /  [details] 
11. A Brief Survey and Comparative Study of Recent Development of Pronoun Coreference Resolution
Hongming Zhang, Xinran Zhao, and Yangqiu Song
In CRAC @ EMNLP 2021.
[paper] /  [code & data] /  [details] 
12. Learning Contextual Causality Between Daily Events from Time-consecutive Images
Hongming Zhang, Yintong Huo, Xinran Zhao, Yangqiu Song, and Dan Roth
In Causality in Vision @ CVPR 2021. [details] 
13. The Effects of Fear of Missing Out on Social Media Posting Preferences
Yue Xi, Jiale Huo, Xinran Zhao, Yushi Jiang, Qiang Yang
In European Journal of Marketing.
preprint
1. Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use?
Tong Chen, Hongwei Wang, Sihao Chen, Wenhao Yu, Kaixin Ma, Xinran Zhao, Dong Yu, Hongming Zhang
In Arxiv
2. "Merge Conflicts!" Exploring the Impacts of External Distractors to Parametric Knowledge Graphs
Cheng Qian, Xinran Zhao, Sherry Tongshuang Wu
In Arxiv
3. Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models
Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao, Dong Yu, Tongshuang Wu, Jianshu Chen
In Arxiv
Academic Events

  • Invited to serve as an area chair for ACL 2024.

  • Invited to serve as a reviewer for ECCV 2022, EMNLP 2022, AAAI 2023, ACL 2023, AACL 2023, EMNLP 2023, AAAI 2024, EACL 2024, NAACL 2024.

  • Invited to give a talk (topic: On Task Difficulty of Few-shot Learning) for ICML 2022 Commonsense Tutorial.

    • Projects
    1. Can Pre-trained Language Models Understand Definitions?
    Advised by Christopher Manning
    CS 224N Final Project.
    2. Seek to Embed ASER: A Large-scale Eventuality Knowledge Graph
    Advised by Xin Liu and Prof. Yangqiu Song
    An acknowledged contributor (paper was accepted by WWW 2020). [paper] /  [details] 
    3. An Online Learning Platform with NLP Supported Teaching Assistant
    Advised by Prof. Dit-Yan Yeung.
    Final Year Project. [details] 
    4. A Comparative Study on the Sentimental Characteristics of Chinese and Western Tourists
    Advised by Xi Yue and Prof. Yushi Jiang
    In Annual Conference of Journal of Marketing Science 2019, China.
    [paper (Chinese)] /  [paper (English)] /  [details] 
    5. One-shot Pokemon Classification
    Advised by Prof. Qifeng Chen.
    Cousework. [report]  [details] 
    Miscellaneous

    Besides researching, I am also keen on other activities:

  • I am an enthusiastic body-builder that can do 140 kg deadlift and 160 kg squat.

  • I am a member of HKUST Mandarin Debate team, where we won the First Prize for Bayarea Debate Championship and Top 8 for the sixth and seventh International Madarin Debate Invitational in Singapore.

  • I am a traditional Chinese poem writer who got a few publishments on newspapers.

  • I am an active member of the HKUST Archery Club.

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    This page is forked from Jon Barron's home page.