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Yufei Tian

About Me

Welcome! I recently joined OpenAI after completing my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UCLA, where I was advised by Professor Nanyun Peng. Prior to that, I received my undergraduate degree from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University in 2020.

My research interest lies in tackling open-ended tasks that require deep intellect (e.g., reasoning, planning, creativity) and nuanced assessment, which cannot be captured by a single metric (e.g., accuracy). These include, but are not limited to: 1) controllable and creative generation; 2) machine reasoning, ideation, and problem-solving; 3) evaluation methods for such open-ended tasks; and 4) NLP + X, X = {cognitive science, music, agents, social science, ...}. I was awarded an Amazon PhD Fellowship, an EMNLP Outstanding Paper Award, and a NAACL Best Paper nomination.

Recent News 🔥:

  • [May 2025] I defended my thesis! 🎓
  • [Oct 2024] Together with Tanmay, Ashima, Salman, and Yining, we are launching a new UCLA NLP Seminar.
  • [Sep 2024] Traveling to COLM 2024 and EMNLP 2024. ☕️
  • [Jun 2024] Presenting Macgyver (unconventional problem solving) at NAACL 2024.
  • [Dec 2023] Presenting BOOST at EMNLP 2023, USC-ISI NLG seminar, and Amazon-UCLA science hub.
  • [Sep 2023] Received an Amazon Fellowship. Thank you Amazon!
  • [May 2023] Check out our lyrics generation demo page!

Experience

Google, Sunnvale, CA • Jun 2024 — Now

Research Intern; Advisor: Zizhao Zhang and Jiao Sun
Pinpointing LLM error patterns via critiques and providing actionable feedback.

AI2, Seattle, WA • Jun 2023 — Sep 2023

Research Intern @ Mosaic Team; Advisor: Faeze Brahman and Ronan Le Bras
Creative problem solving.

Amazon Alexa AI, Sunnyvale, CA • Jun 2022 — Sep 2022

Applied Scientist Intern; Advisor: Anjali Narayan-Chen and Shereen Oraby
Melody-to-Lyrics generation.

Information Science Institute, USC, Los Angeles, CA • Jul 2019 — Sep 2019

Undergraduate Research Assistant; Advisor: Nanyun Peng and Fred Morstatter
Identifying cultural differences through multi-lingual wikipedia.

Singapore Management University, Singapore • Aug 2018 — Dec 2018

Undergraduate Research Assistant; Advisor: Jianfei Yu and Jing Jiang
Review summarization with typed decoders.

Honors

2024, EMNLP Outstanding Paper Award

2024, EMNLP Outstanding Reviewer

2023, Amazon Fellowship

2021, George Bekey Fellow

USC Viterbi fellowship top-off

2019, Dengfeng Scholarship

top 2% awarded for distinction in Information Technology

2015, Intel Outstanding Award on Computer Science

awarded by Intel Corporation at CASTIC (top 2/1500 = 0.0013%)

Preprints

Publications

  1. SkillVerse - Assessing and Enhancing LLMs with Tree Evaluation

    2. Yufei Tian, Jiao Sun, Nanyun Peng, Zizhao Zhang. ACL 2025.

  2. REFFLY - Melody-Constrained Lyrics Editing Model

    3. Songyan Zhao*, Bingxuan Li*, Yufei Tian, Nanyun Peng. NAACL 2025.

  3. Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?

    4. Yufei Tian*, Tenghao Huang*, Miri Liu, Derek Jiang, Alexander Spangher, Muhao Chen, Jonathan May, Nanyun Peng. EMNLP 2024. Outstanding Paper 🏆

  4. Detecting Machine-Generated Long-Form Content with Latent-Space Variables

    5. Yufei Tian, Zeyu Pan, Nanyun Peng. Findings of EMNLP 2024

  5. MacGyver - Are Large Language Models Creative Problem Solvers?

    6. Yufei Tian, Abhilasha Ravichander, Lianhui Qin, Ronan Le Bras, Raja Marjieh, Nanyun Peng, Yejin Choi, Thomas L. Griffiths, Faeze Brahman. NAACL 2024. Best Paper Nomination

  6. Harnessing Black-Box Control to Boost Commonsense in LM's Generation

    7. Yufei Tian, Felix Zhang, Nanyun Peng. EMNLP 2023

  7. Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks

    8. Jiao Sun*, Yufei Tian*, Wangchunshu Zhou*, Nan Xu* (equal contribution), Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, and Xuezhe Ma. EMNLP 2023

  8. Unsupervised Melody-to-Lyric Generation

    9. Yufei Tian, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Alessandra Cervone, Gunnar Sigurdsson, Chenyang Tao, Wenbo Zhao, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, and Nanyun Peng. ACL 2023

  9. A Unified Framework for Pun Generation with Humor Principles

    10. Yufei Tian, Divyanshu Arun Sheth, and Nanyun Peng. Findings of EMNLP 2022

  10. Zero-shot Sonnet Generation with Discourse-level Planning and Aesthetics Features

    11. Yufei Tian and Nanyun Peng. NAACL 2022

  11. Go Back in Time - Generating Flashbacks in Stories with Event Plots and Temporal Prompts

    12. Rujun Han, Hong Chen, Yufei Tian, and Nanyun Peng NAACL 2022

  12. AmbiPun - Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context

    13. Anirudh Mittal*, Yufei Tian* (equal contribution), and Nanyun Peng NAACL 2022

  13. Paraphrase Generation as Unsupervised Machine Translation

    14. Xiaofei Sun, Yufei Tian, Yuxian Meng, Nanyun Peng, Fei Wu, Jiwei Li, and Chun Fan COLING 2022

  14. HypoGen - Hyperbole Generation with Commonsense and Counterfactual Knowledge

    15. Yufei Tian, Arvind krishna Sridhar, and Nanyun Peng. Findings of EMNLP 2021

  15. Identifying Cultural Differences through Multi-Lingual Wikipedia

    16. Yufei Tian, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Fred Morstatter, and Nanyun Peng. SocialNLP@NAACL2021

  16. Aspect and Opinion Aware Abstractive Review Summarization with Reinforced Hard Typed Decoder

    17. Yufei Tian, Jianfei Yu and Jing Jiang. CIKM 2019

Miscellaneous

Classical Music - I was a french horn player in the awesome and long-established Tsinghua University Symphonic Band.

Sports - I have been playing tennis for over 15 years. Besides, I was the keeper of Tsinghua University Women Cricket Team in 2018 when we won a runner-up in Beijing!

Social Links

  • Github: https://github.com/NinaTian98369
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/yufei_t
  • Website: https://yufeitian.github.io/website/