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 Cisco Faculty Award, AAAI'25 New Faculty Highlights, CPAL Rising Star, AdvML Rising Star, OpenAI Researcher Access Award, Gemma Academic Program GCP Credit Award, IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, Adobe Ph.D. Fellowship, Graduate Dean's Prestigious Fellowship, the Best Paper Award from the inaugural Learning on Graphs (LoG) Conference 2022, the Best Demo Paper Award at GenAI4Health at NeurIPS 2024, and the Best Paper Runners-Up Award at Medicine and Healthcare Bridge at AAAI’25.
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
• 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 Runners-Up Award at Medicine and Healthcare Bridge at AAAI 2025.
• 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: Sukwon Yun (KAIST), Xinyu Zhao (Peking University), Pingzhi Li (USTC), Mufan Qiu (USTC), Huanzhi Qu (USTC), and Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan (Vanderbilt 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. 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.
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 -
Levi Harris, B.S., UNC Chapel Hill, 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.
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UNC Chapel Hill Jul. 2024 -Assistant Professor in Computer Science
UNITES Lab at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -
MIT and Harvard Jul. 2023 - Jun. 2024Postdoctoral Researcher in CSAIL@MIT and BMI@Harvard
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard -
UT Austin Aug. 2018 – May 2023Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering
R.K. I studied at Texas A&M from Aug. 2018 to Aug. 2020. -
USTC Aug. 2013 - May 2017B.Sc. in Applied Math & B.Eng. in Computer Science
School of the Gifted Young, Univ. of Science and Technology of China
Useful Links
• [Student Recuriting] ADS in Chinese, ADS in English
• [Teaching] COMP 790-150: Efficient Deep Learning, COMP 560-1: Artificial Intelligence
• [Tutorial] ICML'24 MoE Tutorial (w. Slides)
• [Job Application Package] Research Statement, Job Talk Slides, Resume
• [Tool] Learning to Optimize
• [UNC] Department's Why-UNC Page, UNC CS Ranking
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.