Ziyu Yao's Personal Website
Nguyen Engineering Building, 4415
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, VA, 22030
Hello! I am an Assistant Professor of the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University, where I co-lead the George Mason NLP group. I am also affiliated with C4I & Cyber Center, Center for Advancing Human-Machine Partnership, and Institute for Digital InnovAtion at GMU. I received my PhD degree from Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University (OSU) in 2021. I have spent time interning at Microsoft Semantic Machines, Carnegie Mellon University, Microsoft Research, Fujitsu Lab of America, and Tsinghua University. I work in natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), particularly building natural language interfaces (e.g., question answering and dialogue systems) that can reliably assist humans in knowledge acquisition and task completion. My recent topics include:
- Large language models (LLMs) for planning and reasoning, including advancing the use of LLMs for planning and reasoning in critical domains (e.g., robotics, information extraction, network communication). With collaborators in the Gentopia.AI team, we have built an open-source platform for implementing tool-augmented LLM agents.
- Responsible use of LLMs, including our recent effort in saving the monetary cost of using LLMs and optimizing prompts to encourage task efficacy and safety.
- LLM interpretability: I am broadly interested approaches to understanding NLP/AI models, especially LLMs. Our prior effort includes explaining LLMs for code generation post hoc and understanding their tokenization effect.
Beyond the above topics, I have been working on Language and Code (e.g., co-organized workshop on NLP for Programming at ACL’21) and Human-AI Interaction (e.g., our multi-year effort in “interactive semantic parsing” – ACL’23, ICLR’21, EMNLP’20, EMNLP’19, AAAI’19).
Check out my group here! For prospective students, please read this page before contacting me. Contact me at ziyuyao [AT] gmu [DOT] edu and follow me on Twitter!
news
| 04/2024 |  Check out our new preprint on LLM Agents for Mathematics Education as a teamwork with experts from NLP, HCI, and Mathematics Education! The project was funded by Microsoft Research, Accelerating Foundation Models Research program. |
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| 04/2024 |  I was invited to talk about “Building Natural Language Interfaces in the Age of LLMs” at Indiana University, Indianapolis! Slides are available here. |
| 03/2024 | I was invited to talk about “Towards Enhancing the Utilization of Large Language Models for Humans” at University of Arizona and Virginia Tech NVC! Slides are available here. |
| 03/2024 | Invited to give a guest lecture about LLMs at Department of Health Administration and Policy and School of Education at GMU! |
| 01/2024 | Our paper on LLM Cascade for Cost Saving in Reasoning (Featured in Hugging Face Daily Papers) is now accepted to ICLR’24! Congrats to Murong and collaborators from Microsoft Research and VT! |
| 12/2023 |  Received a grant from Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) on the topic of LLM supply chain security, with Dr. Xiaokuan Zhang. Thank you, CCI! |
| 11/2023 |  I was selected as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS’23, thanks for the discussions with my students! |
| 10/2023 | Check out our three new preprints on Cost-saving LLMs in reasoning (Featured in Hugging Face Daily Papers), Prompt optimization for zero-shot LLMs, and Benchmarking LLMs in spatial-temporal reasoning! |
| 10/2023 | Congrats to Saurabh and Murong for papers accepted to EMNLP’23 main conference (MailEx, a new conversational event extraction benchmark) and the demo track (Gentopia, our open-source platform streamlining the creation and sharing of augmented LLMs)! Many thanks to our collaborators. See U in Singapore! |
| 09/2023 | Received Azure credits from Microsoft Research, Accelerating Foundation Models Research program for our project on LLM4Edu (in collaboration w/ Dr. Anthony E. Kelly at GMU Educational Psychology)! Thank you, Microsoft! |
| 08/2023 | Received a grant from National Science Foundation (NSF) on the topic of interpretability and explainability of large language models for code! Many thanks to NSF and my collaborators Dr. Kevin Moran (GMU -> UCF) and Dr. Denys Poshyvanyk (W&M)! |
| 08/2023 | I gave in-person talks titled “Building Natural Language Interfaces in the Age of LLMs” at Google and Apple! (Good summer time in the Bay Area  ) |
| 07/2023 |  I was invited to serve as Diversity & Inclusion Chair at NAACL 2024! |
| 06/2023 | Congrats to Hao and Daking for receiving the Graduate Student Travel Fund from GMU! |
| 06/2023 | I was invited to serve as Senior PC member at AAAI’24! |
| 05/2023 | Two papers accepted to ACL’23 (main conference)! Congrats to Hao, Saurabh, and Daking! |
| 04/2023 | George Mason organized MASC-SLL 2023, an annual NLP event in the Mid-Atlantic area! |
| 03/2023 | I was invited to serve as reviewer at NeurIPS’23! |
| 02/2023 | I will be attending AAAI’23 in D.C. and serving as Session Chair! |
| 01/2023 | I was invited to serve as Area Chair at ACL’23 (Question Answering). |
| 12/2022 | Received a grant from Commonwealth Cyber Initiative (CCI) on the topic of algorithm explanation and human trust. Thanks to CCI and my collaborator Dr. Tyler Shaw from GMU Psychology! |
| 11/2022 | Congrats to my student Daking Rai for a student abstract accepted to AAAI! Thanks to my collaborators! |
| 11/2022 | Work about GPT-3 for psychological test item generation got accepted to Journal of Business and Psychology. Thanks to my collaborators! |
| 10/2022 | One paper accepted to EMNLP 2022! |
| 10/2022 | I will be giving a talk in the Department of Statistics at GMU! |
| 09/2022 | I will be giving a (virtual) talk at ServiceNow Research! |
| 08/2022 | I will be attending KDD’22 in person! I will serve as a mentor in the KDD Undergraduate Consortium. |
| 07/2022 | I will be attending NAACL’22 in person! Please join our SUKI workshop in July 14! |
| 07/2022 | I was invited to serve as Senior PC member at AAAI’23. |
| 06/2022 | I was invited to serve as Area Chair at EMNLP’22 (Efficient NLP Track). |
| 04/2022 | Gave a talk in the JHU CLSP seminar! |
| 02/2022 | Consider submitting to the SUKI workshop at NAACL2022! |
| 12/2021 | Our paper “CliniQG4QA” won the Best Paper Award at IEEE BIBM 2021! |
| 11/2021 | Our (w/ Penn State, UW, UCSB, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Google Research) workshop proposal “SUKI: Workshop on Structured and Unstructured Knowledge Integration” was accpted to be co-located with NAACL 2022! Stay tuned! |
| 11/2021 | Invited to serve as ACM SIGAI Newsletter co-editor. |
| 08/2021 | Started my journey at George Mason University! Check out our George Mason NLP group website (co-lead with Prof. Antonios Anastasopoulos)! |
| 05/2021 | I will be interning in Microsoft Semantic Machines in this summer (virtually)! |
| 04/2021 | I am awarded the Graduate Student Research Award by OSU, CSE department! |
| 01/2021 | One paper accepted to ICLR’21! Thanks to my collaborators at CMU! |
| 11/2020 | Super honored to receive the Presidential Fellowship from OSU Graduate School! (“The Presidential Fellowship is the most prestigious award given by the Graduate School. Recipients of this award embody the highest standards of scholarship in the full range of Ohio State’s graduate programs.”) |
| 11/2020 | Our workshop proposal on Natural Language Processing for Programming has been accepted to be co-located with ACL 2021! Congrats to collaborators from Bar-Ilan University, UT Austin, CMU, and OSU! Please stay tuned! |
| 10/2020 | Honored to be selected to the Rising Stars in EECS workshop (hosted by UC Berkeley this year)! |
| 09/2020 | Invited poster at Microsoft Research AI Breakthroughs Workshop (virtually). |
| 08/2020 | Invited talk at VMware, Beijing (virtually). |
| 05/2020 | Excited to start summer internship at CMU Language Technologies Institute with Prof. Graham Neubig! |
| 08/2019 | Our work on a principled Interactive Semantic Parsing framework is accepted to EMNLP! See you in Hong Kong! |
| 07/2019 | Talk at ETH Zurich: “Towards Building Interactive and Collaborative Natural Language Interfaces”. |
| 07/2019 | Attended ACL’19 in Florence. |
| 05/2019 | One paper accepted to ACL’19 (my first ACL paper ever). Congrats to my collaborator Boyuan! |
| 01/2019 | Our work exploring machine collaborations between Code Annotation and Code Retrieval is accepted by WWW’19! |
| 10/2018 | We built an Interactive Semantic Parser: talk to your parser to resolve NL ambiguities (accepted by AAAI’19)! |
| 08/2018 | To know more about StaQC? Check out our work “A Comprehensive Study of StaQC for Deep Code Summarization” (accepted by SIGKDD’18 Deep Learning Day)! |
| 05/2018 | Feeling thrilled to start internship at Microsoft Research @ Redmond this summer!! |
| 04/2018 | Attended WWW 2018 conference @ Lyon, France and present our work “StaQC: A Systematically Mined Question-Code Dataset from Stack Overflow”. Check out the slides and quick StaQC examples! |
| 04/2018 | Attended CRA Grad Cohort Workshop for Women (CRA-W) @ San Francisco. |
| 09/2017 | Gave a talk about “Mining Code Answers to Natural Language Questions” at OSU CSE AI seminar. |
selected publications
2024
- PreprintMathVC: An LLM-Simulated Multi-Character Virtual Classroom for Mathematics EducationarXiv Preprint, 2024
- Preprint
- PreprintInstances Need More Care: Rewriting Prompts for Instances with LLMs in the Loop Yields Better Zero-Shot PerformancearXiv Preprint, 2024
- ICLR’24Large Language Model Cascades with Mixture of Thoughts Representations for Cost-efficient Reasoning(Featured in Hugging Face Daily Papers: https://huggingface.co/papers?date=2023-10-06)The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (also at ICLR Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models), 2024
2023
- ACL’23Improving Generalization in Language Model-based Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing: Two Simple Semantic Boundary-based Techniques(Rank#8 on Spider leaderboard as of Aug 2023)In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), 2023
- AAAI’23 SAExplaining Large Language Model-Based Neural Semantic Parsers (Student Abstract)AAAI Student Abstract, 2023