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Yufei Tian

About Me

Welcome! I am a CS PhD candidate at UCLA working on natural language processing, under the supervision of Professor Nanyun Peng. My research interest lies in 1) controllable and creative text generation; 2) machine reasoning (social, physical, and logical); 3) evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs); and 4) NLP + X, X = {music, agent, cognitive science, computational social science, ...}.

Education

University of California, Los Angeles USA • 2021 — Present

Ph.D. student at CS Department

University of Southern California, USA • 2020 — 2021

Ph.D. student at CS Department (Transferred out)

Tsinghua University, China • 2016 — 2020

Bachelor of Engineering (Automation), Minor in Finance, Exchange student @ NTU Singapore

Experience

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

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

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

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

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

  3. Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks

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

  4. Unsupervised Melody-to-Lyric Generation

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

  5. A Unified Framework for Pun Generation with Humor Principles

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

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

    7. Yufei Tian and Nanyun Peng. NAACL 2022

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

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

  8. AmbiPun - Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context

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

  9. Paraphrase Generation as Unsupervised Machine Translation

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

  10. HypoGen - Hyperbole Generation with Commonsense and Counterfactual Knowledge

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

  11. Identifying Cultural Differences through Multi-Lingual Wikipedia

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

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

    13. 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/