Bio
I am a PhD candidate at the UC Santa Cruz working with Prof. Yi Zhang. I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science with a Statistics minor, and Master's degree in Natural Language Processing from UC Santa Cruz.
My research aims to empower AI systems with advanced reasoning capabilities. I work at the intersection of the following topics:
• Complex Planning and Reasoning: My research aims to solve real-world problems, which often require multi-step reasoning and actions.
• Multi-agent Collaboration: I work on MAS (multi-agent systems), so my study also includes how agents coordinate, communicate, and share information.
• Information Retrieval: I conduct research on, but not limited to, RAG with LLM; broadly speaking, I care about Retrieval-Augmented AI.
News
- Three papers accepted to NeurIPS 2025! [LinkedIn post for details]
- I will be teaching NLP 255 at UC Santa Cruz this Fall
- Check out our work on Generative Information Retrieval
- Check out our work on "thinking with image". GIRT: Grounded Reasoning with Images & Texts
- Our paper Knowing You Don't Know: Learning When to Continue Search in Multi-round RAG through Self-Practicing is accepted by SIGIR 2025
- I am excited to be working as a Student Researcher at Google DeepMind
- Our paper Right this way: Can VLMs Guide Us to See More to Answer Questions? is accepted by NeurIPS 2024
- Slides, paper, and more resources covered in our SIGIR 2024 tutorial tools-meet-llm are available online
- Our paper IM-RAG: Inner Monologue Retrieval-Augmented Generation is accepted by SIGIR 2024
- Our paper An interpretable answer scoring framework is accepted by SIGIR Generative-IR 2024
- Our paper E-commerce Question Intent Taxonomy is accepted by SIGIR eCom 2024
- Our paper IMMO: Inner Monologue Multi-Modal Optimization is accepted by AAAI 2024
- Our paper Learning Inner Monologue is accepted by NeurIPS 2023 Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) workshop
- I will work as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon during this summer
- I am excited to be working as a part-time AI resident at Mineral
- Our paper CPL is accepted by EMNLP 2022
- I will (re)join UCSC as a Graduate student
Experience
- Google DeepMind: Student Researcher, 2025
- Amazon Alexa: Applied Scientist Intern, 2023
- Mineral.ai, an Alphabet company, previous Google[X] project: AI Resident, 2023, 2024
Teaching and Mentoring
Instructor:
As of 2025 Fall, I am serving as the graduate student instructor for NLP 255 – Topics in Applied Natural Language Processing.
Research Mentor:
I am dedicated to mentoring students, ranging from high schoolers to Grad students, supporting them in pursuing their career goals in either academic research or engineering in AI.List of Mentored Students
Teaching assistant:
2023, 2024 - Applied Machine Learning: Deep Learning
2023 - Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
2022 - Programming Abstractions
Services
Reviewer:
2026 - AAAI, ECIR
2025 - ECIR, ICLR, ICML, SIGIR, ACL, NeurIPS, Knowledge-Based Systems
2024 - TheWebConf (WWW), CVPR, ICML, NeurIPS
2023 - NeurIPS
Event Organizer:
Co-organized the tools-meet-llm tutorial at ACM SIGIR 2024.
Co-chair and organizer of the 1st AI Student Research Symposium at UC Santa Cruz.
Selected Publications
Full publication list can be found on Google Scholar page. (* equal contribution, † co-advisor).
Get Connected
I am always interested in working with new collaborators from all backgrounds on research ideas and/or impactful projects related to my areas of interest. That being said, I commit the sufficient time to each project I take on, so my availability for new projects may depends on current commitments.
If you’re interested in collaborating, feel free to send me an email to find a time to chat!