Tianlong Chen
Assistant Professor, CS@UNC at Chapel Hill
Chief AI Scientist, hireEZ
tianlong@cs.unc.edu
Bio
Tianlong Chen starts as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Fall 2024. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA, in 2023.
His research focuses on efficient and reliable machine learning, large language model agents, multimodal learning, and AI for Biomedical Science. He received the Meta Research Award (x3), Amazon Research Award (x2), Cisco Faculty Award (x4), IBM-UNC Junior Faculty Development Award, WAIC Yufan Award, and several best/outstanding paper awards from various conferences and workshops like SIGBio, NAACL, LoG, AMIA, ACM MM, AAAI, NeurIPS, etc. He regularly serves as conference (senior) area chairs, journal editors, invited speakers, tutorial/workshop organizers, various panelist positions, and reviewers. His research is gratefully supported by NIH, NSF, DOE, as well as dozens of industry and university grants.
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
• Mar., 2026 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of Meta Research Award. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Mar., 2026 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Feb., 2026 [STATUS] UNITES welcomes new member Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Konz (Duke University) join as as a Postdoctoral Researcher.
• Feb., 2026 [HONOR] Congratulations to our PhD student Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan to be one of the Anthropic Fellow.
• Feb., 2026 [PAPER] 3 CVPR'26 accepted - Securing Multimodal Reasoning + VLM-3R + MonoVLM.
• Jan., 2026 [HONOR] Congratulations to our Postdoc Dr. Jinhao Duan to receive the DAAD AInet Fellowship.
• Jan., 2026 [PAPER] 8 ICLR'26 accepted - Graph of Agents + LoRA Adapters for Evolving LLMs + Efficient Reasoning + Explanatory Inversion to Improve LLM Reasoning + CellDuality: Unlocking Biological Reasoning + AudioTrust + FaithCoT + LLM Adaptive Thinking.
• Jan., 2026 [PAPER] 3 CPAL'26 accepted - Symbolic Regression for Alpha Factors + Visual Prompt for Compression + Symbiotic Cooperation for Web Agents.
• Jan., 2026 [PAPER] 1 EACL'26 Findings accepted - Medical Chatbot: Dialogue is Better Than Monologue.
• Jan., 2026 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of CAIS Open Weights Safeguards Award . Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Dec., 2025 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Dec., 2025 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of Tinker Teaching Grant. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Dec., 2025 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of IBM-UNC Junior Faculty Development Award. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Nov., 2025 [PAPER] 4 AAAI'26 accepted - Steering Agent Behavior (Oral) + Uncertainty-Guarding QA + OR-R1 + Robust Multimodal Learning.
• Nov., 2025 [HONOR] Honored to be the recipient of Electronics Young Investigator Award 2025. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Oct., 2025 [HONOR] Congratulations to UNITES and our amazing collaborators for wining the Best Paper Award at Spatial Intelligence Workshop at ACM MM 2025.
• Oct., 2025 [HONOR] Congratulations to UNITES and our amazing collaborators for wining the ACM SIGBio Best Paper Award.
• Oct., 2025 [PAPER] 1 Nature Plants accepted.
• Oct., 2025 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of two Meta Research Award. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Oct., 2025 [HONOR] Grateful to receive a gift funding from Cisco Research. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Sep., 2025 [PAPER] 6 NeurIPS'24 accepted - SMoE on 3.5D Chiplet (Spotlight) + Bayesian LLM Judges + Multi-Agent Debates + One Token Deadlock Attack + BrainMoE + IndustryEQA (Dataset and Benchmark Track).
• Sep., 2025 [PAPER] 1 S&P'26 accepted - Practical Keystroke Timing Attacks.
• Sep., 2025 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of the Amazon Research Award for Spring 2025. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Aug., 2025 [HONOR] Grateful to receive a gift funding from Cisco Research. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Aug., 2025 [STATUS] UNITES welcomes 11 new members (8 Ph.D. + 2 Postdoc + 1 M.S.): Mohan Zhang (USTC) + Yuhang Cheng (Wuhan University) + Kangqi Ni (RICE) + Laura Yao (CMU) + Yu-Chao Huang (National Taiwan University) + Zijie Liu (WashU) + Zhuoxuan Zhang (Brown) + Shuqing Luo (PKU) + Jinhao Duan (Drexel) + Gengwei Zhang (UTS) + Zhen Xu (Zhejiang University). Three of them get delayed due to VISA constraints.
• Aug., 2025 [PAPER] 9 EMNLP'25 (6 Main + 3 Findings) accepted - Next Agent Prediction + Embodied Reward Model with Test-time Scaling + Bit Flip Error Resilience in LLMs + Instruction-Driven Routing for MoE + Adaptive Resolution for VLLMs + MedHallucinations Benchmark + Large-scale Parameter Generation + Training Strategies for MoE + Efficient Long Context Inference w. LLMs.
• Jul, 2025 [PAPER] 1 COLM'25 accepted - Multi-model Safety Alignment.
• Jun., 2025 [Workshop] NeurIPS'25 Workshop accepted - Lock-LLM . Call for Papers!
• May, 2025 [PAPER] 10 ACL'25 (5 Main + 5 Findings) accepted - Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents (Intergated in Google Gemini) + Indirect Attack in Multi-Agent Systems + UQ in LLM + Efficient LLM Recommender + Multi-Agent System for Content Analysis + Multi-omics Foundation Model + Spatial2Sentence + UQ-Merging + De-Identification in MLLM + Task-specific Privacy Vulnerabilities in MLLMs.
• May, 2025 [PAPER] 1 JBI'25 (Journal of Biomedical Informatics) accepted - Personalized Graph Learning on EHRs.
• May, 2025 [PAPER] 2 KDD'25 accepted - Graph Learning w. Missing Features + Trustworthy LLM Agent (Survey + Toturial).
• May, 2025 [HONOR] Honored to be selected and attend the 12th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) 2025 .
• May, 2025 [PAPER] 4 ICML'25 accepted - Communication Topology Designs in Multi-Agent System (Spotlight) + New MoE Parallism + Adaptive Multimodal Learning + Interpretable MoE.
• Apr., 2025 [HONOR] Honored to be one of the recipients of the Amazon Research Award for Fall 2024. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Apr., 2025 [HONOR] Congratulations to Mohan Zhang, Pingzhi Li, and our amazing collaborators for wining the low-resource methods for NLP SAC Award at NAACL 2025.
• Mar., 2025 [HONOR] Grateful for receiving two UNC Accelerating AI Awards from Office of The Provost at UNC. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Mar., 2025 [HONOR] Congratulations to UNITES and our amazing collaborators for wining the Marco Ramoni Distinguished Paper Award at AMIA-IS 2025.
• Mar., 2025 [HONOR] Grateful for receiving the NAIRR Pilot Award in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems.
• Feb., 2025 [PAPER] 1 DMLR accepted - Diagnosis of Viral Infections via scRNA-seq Analysis.
• Jan., 2025 [PAPER] 4 NAACL'25 accepted - Collaboration-Constrained Routing for MoE Efficiency + Balanced Preference Optimization in LLM Alignment + LLM-Guided Conversation in Autobiography Interviewing + Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Defense.
• Jan., 2025 [PAPER] 6 ICLR'25 accepted - Training-Free and Portable LLM Model Patches + Economical Multi-Agent Communication + Lifelong Multimodal Instruction Tuning + Composable LLMs Interventions + Proactive Privacy Amnesia for LLMs + Mixture-of-Graphs. Congratulations to Rana for his first 1st author ICLR paper.
• Jan., 2025 [HONOR] I received the 2025 CPAL Rising Star Award and 2025 KAUST Rising Stars Award (Declined Due to VISA Constraints). Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Jan., 2025 [HONOR] I received the AAAI New Faculty Highlights 2025. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Jan., 2025 [HONOR] Congratulations to UNITES and our amazing collaborators for wining the Best Paper Award at GenAI4Health at AAAI 2025.
• Jan., 2025 [HONOR] Congratulations to UNITES and our amazing collaborators for wining the Best Paper Runners-Up Award at Medicine and Healthcare Bridge at AAAI 2025.
• Jan., 2025 [HONOR] Grateful to receive a gift funding from Cisco Research. Many thanks for the acknowledgment.
• Dec., 2024 [HONOR] Congratulations to Xinyu Zhao and our amazing collaborators for wining the Best Demo Paper Award at GenAI4Health at NeurIPS 2024.
• Dec., 2024 [PAPER] 6 AAAI'25 accepted - Metacognitive AI in LLM + Visual Prompting Helps Sparsity + Brain Pathway Learning + UQ in LLMs + Disentangled Multimodal Learning + Sparsity Improves Certification.
• Dec., 2024 [Workshop] Two ICLR'25 Workshop and One PAKDD'25 Workshop accepted - Sparsity in LLM + Scalable Optimization and Adaptive Foundation Model + Pervasive Computing. Call for Papers!
• Nov., 2024 [PAPER] One KDD'25 accepted - C2C Recommendation Datasets (ADS Track).
• Oct., 2024 [PAPER] Four NeurIPS'24 accepted - Flexible Modality Learning (Spotlight) + Game-Theoretic Evaluation for LLM Reasoning + Efficient, Fair, Robust Graph Learning + Model-Glue (Dataset and Benchmark Track).
• 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 six new Ph.D. students and one new M.S. student: Sukwon Yun (KAIST), Xinyu Zhao (Peking University), Pingzhi Li (USTC), Mufan Qiu (USTC), Huanzhi Qu (USTC), Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan (Vanderbilt University), and Ruichen Zhang (Shandong University).
• 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.
Mufan Qiu, B.S., USTC, Aug. 2024 -
Xinyu Zhao, M.S., Peking Uiversity, Aug. 2024 -
Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan, B.S., Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2024 -
Mohan Zhang, B.E., USTC, Aug. 2025 -
Yuhang Chen, B.S., Wuhan University, Aug. 2025 -
Kangqi Ni, B.S., Rice University, Aug. 2025 -
Laura Yao, B.S., Carnegie Mellon University, Aug. 2025 -
Yu-Chao Huang, M.S., National Taiwan University, Aug. 2025 -
Zijie Liu, M.S., Washington University in St. Louis, Aug. 2025 -
Ruichen Zhang, M.S., UNC Chapel Hill, Dec. 2025 -
Zhuoxuan Zhang, M.S., Brown University, Aug. 2026 -
Shuqing Luo, M.S., Peking Uiversity, Aug. 2026 -
Haocheng Zhang, M.S., UCLA, Aug. 2026 -
Xianfeng Wu, B.S., Transferred from HKUST, Aug. 2026 -
Hongxuan Li, (co-supervised with Dr. Xingcheng Lin, NCSU), M.S., Duke University, Aug. 2026 -
Yuzhi Hu, M.S., Boston University, Aug. 2026 -
Gengwei Zhang, Ph.D., University of Technology Sydney, Dec. 2025 -
Nicholas (Nick) Konz, Ph.D., Duke University, Feb. 2026 -
Dinara Aliyeva, M.S., Korea University, Aug. 2025 -
Jiaheng Guo, B.S., Nanjing University, Aug. 2026 -
Yishuo Chen, B.S., Nankai University, Aug. 2026 -
Haoyu Kang, B.S., Central South University, Aug. 2026 -
Huaizhi Qu, Earned Master Degree at UNC, Aug. 2024 - May. 2026
Levi Harris, Earned Master Degree at UNC, Aug. 2024 - May. 2026
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]
Sponsors
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.