Tianlong Chen

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

tianlong@cs.unc.edu

Bio

Tianlong Chen received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA, in 2023. He starts as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Fall 2024. Before that, he is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (CSAIL@MIT), Harvard (BMI@Harvard), and Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard in 2023-2024.

His research focuses on building accurate, trustworthy, and efficient machine learning systems. He devotes his most recent passion to various (A) important machine learning problems - sparsity, robustness, learning to optimize, graph learning, and diffusion models; (B) interdisciplinary scientific challenges - bioengineering and quantum comptuing. He received IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, Adobe Ph.D. Fellowship, Graduate Dean's Prestigious Fellowship, AdvML Rising Star, and the Best Paper Award from the inaugural Learning on Graphs (LoG) Conference 2022.

I am looking for highly motivated students, in terms of RA/TA/externship/internship/visiting students. Interested candidates are strongly encouraged to contact me by email, together with resume and transcripts.

News

• Sep., 2024    [PAPER] Three EMNLP'24 accepted - LLM RAG Vulnerabilities + FFN-SkipLLM + Calibration LLM Pruning; Two EMNLP'24 Findings accepted - Synergized KG and LLM for AD + Cross-Lingual Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing.
Jul., 2024    [PAPER] Two ECCV'24 accepted - Multiplexed Immunofluorescence Image Analysis + Facial Affective Behavior Analysis. Congratulations to Sukwon Yun for his first 1st author ECCV paper.
• Jul., 2024    [STATUS] I started my Assistant Professor position at CS@UNC Chapel Hill.
• May, 2024    [PAPER] Six ICML'24 accepted - ZO LLM Tuning + Graph Sparsification + Rliabile SMoE + Biologial-informed Protein Representation Learning + Sparse Cocktail + TrustLLM (Position Paper).
• Apr., 2024    [PAPER] One Bioinformatics accepted - scRNA Imputation via Bi-level Feature Propagation.
• Apr., 2024    [Tutorial] Our tutorial of "Mixture-of-Experts in the Era of LLMs: A New Odyssey" has been accepted by ICML'24. See you at Vienna!
• Mar., 2024    [PAPER] One NAACL'24 accepted - Multiple LLM Agents Gaming.
• Mar., 2024    [STATUS] UNITES welcomes five new Ph.D. students: Sukwon Yun (KAIST), Xinyu Zhao (Peking University), Pingzhi Li (USTC), Mufan Qiu (USTC), and Huanzhi Qu (USTC).
• Mar., 2024    [PAPER] Two CVPR'24 accepted - Diffusion Quantization + Molecular Data Programming.
• Feb., 2024    [PAPER] Two ICLR'24 accepted - SMoE Merging (Spotlight) + Multilingual SMoE. Congratulations to Pingzhi Li and Xinyu Zhao for their first 1st author ICLR papers.
• Jan., 2024    [Tutorial] Our tutorial of "Zeroth-Order Machine Learning: Fundamental Principles and Emerging Applications in Foundation Models" has been accepted by AAAI'24 and ICASSP'24.
• Jan., 2024    [PAPER] One EACL'24 accepted - LLM + Knowledge Graph.

• Dec., 2023    [PAPER] One AAAI'24 accepted - Metacognitive Intervention for LLMs via Sparsity.
• Nov., 2023    [HONOR] Congratulations to Pingzhi Li and our amazing collaborators for wining the 1st place at 2023 Quantum Computing for Drug Discovery Challenge at ICCAD.
• Sep., 2023    [PAPER] Two NeurIPS'23 accepted - Essential Sparsity in LLM + LLM Heavy-Hitter Oracle.
• Jul., 2023    [STATUS] I started my PostDoc at CSAIL@MIT and BMI@Harvard.
• Jul., 2023    [PAPER] Three ICCV'23 accepted - Adaptive Multi-Task Vision MoE + Robust MoE (Oral) + Generalizable NeRF w. MoE.
• Jul., 2023    [PAPER] One QCE'23 accepted - Sparse Circuit Design for Quantum Computing.
• Jun., 2023    [HONOR] I received the 2023 AdvML Rising Star Award . Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• May, 2023    [PAPER] One ACL'23 accepted - Sparse LLM Tuning.
• May, 2023    [PAPER] Three ICML'23 accepted - Instant Soup (Oral) + Graph Ladling + L2O Game.
• May, 2023    [STATUS] I received the Ph.D. degree from ECE@UT Austin. I deeply appreciate all the support and help from my family, advisor (Prof. Atlas Wang) , collaborators, and friends!

UNITES Lab

University of North Carolina, AI Trustworthiness, Efficiency, and for Science (UNITES) Group is an active research lab at UNC Chapel Hill. Our research interests span the area of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), optimization, computer vision, natural language processing, and data science, with two major focuses on (A) establishing robust and efficient AI systems; (B) bridging the gap between AI and societal & scientific challenges. Students' information is presented below.

Pingzhi Li, B.E., USTC, Aug. 2024 -
Mufan Qiu, B.S., USTC, Aug. 2024 -
Huaizhi Qu, B.E., USTC, Aug. 2024 -
Xinyu Zhao, M.S., Peking Uiversity, Aug. 2024 -
Sukwon Yun, M.S., KAIST, Aug. 2024 -
Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan, B.S., Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2024 -
Ruichen Zhang, B.E., Shandong University, Aug. 2024 -

Mohan Zhang (USTC, Spring 2024) [Remote]
Haiyang Xu (USTC, Spring 2024) [Remote]
Daiwei Li (UCSD, Summer 2023, Spring 2024) [Remote]
Jialin Wu (USTC, Summer 2023, Spring 2024) [Remote]
Xinnan Zhang (USTC, Summer 2023, Spring 2024) [Remote]
Tiancheng He (SJTU+UMich, Summer 2023, Spring 2024) [Remote]
Yaoyao Xu (Columbia, Summer 2023, Spring 2024) [Remote]
Can Jin (USTC, Summer 2023) [Remote]
Kaixin Zheng (Summer 2023) [Remote]
Silin Cai (Summer 2023) [Remote]

Vitæ

Full Resume in PDF.

More About Me

• I am a big fan of Pokémon. Playing Pokémon Go is one of my daily activities. Join me, catch the Pokémon in North Carolina, and be a good Pokémon trainer!
• I also enjoy Hip-Hop and Country music. Air (艾热) is one of my favorite Chinese Hip-Hop stars.

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Tianlong Chen
Last updated on May 2024