Tianlong Chen
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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.
News
• 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.
• 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] 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: 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.
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]
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.